I learned how to model a topographic map in a Southern California junior high school earth science class. Yesterday, when fog descended about three hundred meters from the source of the Fowey and its surrounding, defensive bog, the cheeky arts and crafts attempt at teaching concepts like geological formation translated to survival skill. I understood how to follow a windy, undulating line. The assignment was to model a mountain; we were allowed to pick our favourite ski hills. Topographic maps and illustrations offered plenty of resources to translate 2-D to 3-D. The modelling focuses attention to a tiny detail: each line on the map circling to the top, the higher you go, the further you will be away from mush and water (and avalanche fodder): if you don’t allow gravity to pull you down, you will stay at relatively the same elevation. Whilst Bodmin Moor is not littered with the sharp peaks and deep crevasses of Mammoth Mountain, fear is still there. Being absorbed into and suffocated by a bog is as equally concerning as finding yourself buried 10 feet deep under an avalanche – in fact I would argue the former is much more foreboding … bogs are ancient and dark and pull you into some unimaginable dark world. A nothing that will never melt.
 
In general, Crossing Bodmin Moor isn’t physically draining – it is not very large when compared to its neighbour Dartmoor, Exmoor, or the Cambrian Mountains to the north. Yet, as I walk along this relatively compact terrain, the dense fog keeps drawing me back to Mammoth. And when Mammoth wandered off, 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. Then crossing the Negev, its heat and endless desert and wavering landmarks, nearly unnavigable without GPS.
 
 
Bodmin Moor is less technically challenging than either Lairig Ghru, the Negev or Mammoth. However, the rain, sleet, and dense fog of the moment required a total recall of the analogue navigation skills needed in those locations. And while I have done substantial walking and mountaineering through Britain specifically, I seem to have always been ‘lucky with the weather’. Now, a journey following crumbs left behind by ancient Cornwall and Daphne du Maurier, was left with only one guide: the earth under my feet that could disappear into composting earth and water at any moment.
 
My experiences in Scotland gave me bearings for moor navigation – including bog problems, confidence
bashing heather, and an ability to bushwack and fallen-tree hop with as little backlash from the unwieldy debris and bramble as possible. Walking the Ridgeway in Wiltshire washed some of my concerns of being shot while trespassing a childhood in America fostered¹‘technically’ wild camping it is against the law in England specifically, but there are respectful ways of doing it that are overlooked for the countryside (long distance) walker whose looks deny any associations with tramps or otherwise deviant individuals.. Ultimately though, my prior British walking experiences did not involve institutional data collection and therefore the sense of trepidation translated into a sense of adventure, not the emotional turmoil of potentially dying on the job. Nonetheless, I did have the unconventional skills and knowledge required to navigate myself out of similar situations. I was not worried about embarrassing myself as a lost tourist, an unfortunate American, as I was and am fully capable in the moment of not worrying about what people will thing of my mistakes later.
 
 Data collection on this crossing of Bodmin Moor offered a thorough education on the labour of the land itself, moving and sinking slowly underfoot in ways that humans experience as stationary. The stone walls of Leskernik Hill, buried under millennia of shifting earth, pushed into man-made gullies and other deterrents to foreign travellers … suggesting a path out if you followed the ancient invaders’ potential siege route. Settlements like Leskernik are Neolithic fences, forming the borders that certainly take you somewhere. The impossibly deep fissures direct flash floods to water and gorges, becoming useful pre-historical moats. Through the fog I followed these moat walls up to their tops, the same way you follow the cliff faces in Lhairig Ghru.
 
 The training to do investigative research in labs, archives, and on writing desks rarely accounts for their rooms. Though labs present significant safety issues and archives require specific preservation protocols, the climate control in these rooms is seldom felt by the human body … so you are rarely thinking about how ‘the way you feel’ might be shaping the research outcomes and outputs. Getting lost on your own in a foggy, boggy haunted moor … making sure you have shelter, food, and a makeshift loo draws awareness to how much we miss in knowledge-gathering missions; how much 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 are not only difficult to measure, but they are also experienced as out of the scope of what is valid data. This is why I feel it necessary to do things this way: write on-site, sleep in the place, go out regardless of the climate (even when it risks equipment failure). We can ‘do’ research because the conditions allow it. So, indeed, the conditions are absolutely affecting the outcomes.

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 terrain²Update from late 2025: In the end Cornwell did lead to dwelling on these matters.
 
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, on route towards procedures and methods, to discover this desire-driven unfinished process produces navigation skills to self-actualise on terms you find on your own.

 In a bog. In a fog.

Continue to ‘a bog’ …