I learned how to model a topographic map in a southern California junior high school. Yesterday, when fog descended about three hundred meters from the source of the Fowey and its adjacent, massive bog, this arts and crafts meant explaining that earth science became a survival skill. Modelling a mountain, we were allowed to pick our favourite ski hills, is not a meticulous activity. Still, it does force attention to a tiny detail: the higher you go, the less mush, and if you follow the ridge, you will always stay at the same height. Whilst Bodmin Moor does not feature the elevations or deep crevasses as Mammoth Mountain, one certainly can succumb to fear of being absorbed into a bog or other features one might overlook whilst in deep mist. Crossing Bodmin Moor isn’t physically draining or large compared to its neighbour Dartmoor. Yet, I kept returning to Mammoth Mountain in the dense fog over a two-day crossing. When I woke up from that dream, I would remember Lairig Ghru in Scotland – 35km of narrow glen, mountains shooting up on each side over 800m and a nasty wind that can carry in the kind of weather that leaves experienced walkers and mountaineers stranded.
 
Bodmin Moor is not as technically challenging as either Lairig Ghru or Mammoth. However, rain, sleet, and dense fog require a total recall of analogue navigation skills needed in those locations. And while I have done substantial walking and mountaineering through Britain, the weather has always been kind. Looking for clues to ancient Cornwall and signs of Daphne du Mauriers vanishing, the only guide became the earth under my feet, which could disappear into the water at any moment.
 
My experiences in Scotland gave me bearings for moor navigation – including how to avoid or navigate through a bog, heather bash, and bushwack through open terrains (including clear cuts). My experiences along the Ridgeway in Wiltshire grounded my understanding of English wild camping protocols even though ‘technically’ it is against the law in England specifically (without landowners permission) – this wild, stealth camping is lightly tolerated when one sets up after dark, breaks down before sunrise and keeps to a strict leave no trace ethos. This prior walking experience was not a direct data-collecting fieldwork mission for this thesis. However, I developed some unconventional skills and knowledge required to make this work. During the crossing of Bodmin Moor I was now introduced to land works, such as the stone walls of Leskernik Hill, that created man-made gullies and other deterrents to foreign travellers. From my perspective, I experience settlements like Leskernik as neolithic fences and hedgerows in the form of impossibly deep fissures that allow flash flood gorges, a kind of pre-historical moat well placed between impossible deep marshes). Hence, a lot like Lhairig Ghru.
 
When I think about the investigative research centred in labs, archives, and writing desks, this outdoor skills training does not lend itself to similar metaphors. Skills like this are not taught alongside tertiary subjects involving lab safety or archive etiquette. Labs do present significant safety issues – but there is something about getting lost on your own in a foggy, boggy haunted moor, feeding yourself and making sure you have shelter, food, and a makeshift loo awareness to how much we miss in knowledge-gathering missions that is overlooked and undervalued. These are perspective-changing factors that tune in specific senses otherwise dormant in climate-controlled settings. Even in the most innovative mixed-method scientific studies, these elements would be difficult to measure. This is why I feel it necessary to do things this way: think about it, tune in to ‘get’ what is out there.
 
I could dwell on questions about the relationship between active senses on a moor and knowledge production, or even what this kind of fieldwork does to my knowledge of the reasons I came here: Daphne du Maurier and the pantheons of creative FLINTA Folx who call upon the ancient, indigenous, and bound-to-the-earth goddess spiritual practices the Southwest, for some, is associated with. The intuitive and indescribable and the in/congruities of solo navigation mean engaging with FLINTA ways of knowing and being in potent, haunted, impossible, and undervalued terrains like these.
 
There is no there, there on Bodmin Moor – not one feature more central than another. A thousand questions and thoughts are chased by collecting photographs, videos, and sound, making illustrations – impulses on alert.

Continue to ‘a bog’ …