The Keeper of Unwalked Roads

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — Dartmoor, late autumn

The moor does not keep its roads tidily. Walk any stretch of Dartmoor long enough and you will cross a track that goes nowhere now, a green trench through the gorse where a tinner's path or a parish way used to run before the mine closed or the church moved its burying ground or the reason simply stopped mattering. The maps mark some of these. Most they do not. Locals call them the unwalked roads, and they will tell you, if the weather is bad enough and the pub is warm enough, that something keeps them.

The wider tradition here is old and well attested. Dartmoor's ignis fatuus goes by the name hinkypunk in the West Country tongue, a bobbing light seen over bog and combe that farmers and travellers alike blamed for drawing them from safe ground into the mire. The remedy collected by folklorists working this ground in the last century was oddly practical: turn your coat inside out and the pixy leading you loses its hold, the logic being that the light knows you by the clothes you wear and a reversed coat makes you a stranger to it. Pixy-led is the term still used for the sensation of a familiar path gone suddenly wrong, hedges in the wrong place, a gate where there was none, home further away with every step.

The Lantern Man, as he is told to me now, is a narrower and stranger cousin of that light. Where the hinkypunk simply misleads, he is said to offer something. His lantern does not lure you into a bog by accident; it shows you, quite deliberately, a road that was abandoned before it reached wherever it was going, and along that road, they say, is a version of a life you did not live. The version of the wife who did not leave, the son who did not go to sea, the house that did not burn. I could not find how old this particular telling is. The hinkypunk and the pixy-led belong to a documented, centuries-deep vein of West Country belief; the Keeper as a named, singular figure feels newer to me, or perhaps simply more private, kept closer by the families who tell it and less often given to outsiders with notebooks.

What is consistent, in the three tellings I managed to gather round Postbridge and up towards the old peat tracks near Whitehorse Hill, is the price. To follow him you must leave one memory of home behind you on the road, and it does not come back. A woman near Bellever told me her grandmother's version plainly: you feel it go like a tooth pulled, a gap where a birthday or a face used to sit, and you do not choose which one. Follow far enough, spend enough memories, and you arrive somewhere the storytellers themselves will not go. What happens when the last is spent is the one part every version agrees on refusing to say. Not because it is forbidden, they insist, but because nobody who could tell it has come back to be asked.

I left Dartmoor without meeting any light of my own, which does not surprise me and does not entirely comfort me either. The old roads are still there under the bracken, going nowhere in particular, patient in the way that only abandoned things are.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.