Arthur Conan Doyle - Approaching the Moor

Approaching
the Moor

The eerie environs leave Watson
as uncertain as a reader
picking up a new book.

In a sense, the moor itself supplants the role of antagonist in this novel. While the criminal lurks beyond our reach, another struggle unfolds up front and center between the narrator and his setting. That conflict emerges due to Doyle's careful handling of the landscape throughout the text. He constructs the moor as forbidding and unnatural to alienate both Watson and the reader from the surroundings. A certain eeriness results and all seem helpless to stop it, save the extraordinary Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle links landscape and mood from the very moment the moor first appears in a passage midway through chapter six.

Watson’s initial approach to the moor alongside the Baskerville heir, Sir Henry, and his neighbor, Dr. Mortimer, impresses upon him and the reader the supernatural foreboding of the countryside. A series of contextual juxtapositions weaves a sinister backdrop for specters and murderers to run wild. As the granite tors first show on the horizon, Watson turns toward Sir Henry, who seems immediately out of place ‘with his tweed suit and American accent.’ Something darkly comic arises in the juxtaposition of the displaced heir seeking his fortune amid the menacing hills; Henry seems somehow naive and the whole venture rather foolhardy. Doyle’s fluctuation between relative highs and lows makes the footing as uneasy as standing on an actual tor.

Likewise Sir Henry displays a flux of emotion on his approach to the moor, which ranges from eagerness to uneasiness as it parallels the novel’s changing landscape. Because he traveled to America in his young teens and never visited Baskerville Hall, the moor ‘is all as new to [him] as to Dr. Watson.’ Like the reader and Watson, Sir Henry also approaches the moor with fresh eyes. En route from London, the lush Devonshire countryside leaves him as ‘keen as possible to see the moor,’ a sentiment that Watson confirms in his ‘expressive’ and ‘eager’ face. Only after the ‘wagonette had topped a rise [to show] the huge expanse of the moor’ does Henry’s demeanor alter. At that point ‘even Baskerville fell silent and pulled his overcoat more closely around him.’ The baronet’s sudden sobriety marks the moor as a place both alien and unsettling.

Frequent comparisons between the moorland and the surrounding countryside emphasize further the sense of otherworldliness about the moor. Watson contrasts the ‘green squares of the fields and the low curve of the wood’ with ‘a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit.’ The diction portrays a country landscape with life and curvature against another stark and angular. Later, the ‘peaceful and sunlit countryside’ recedes and beyond rises, ‘dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills.’ Watson further attends to the ‘marks of the waning year,’ which he perceives in the ‘yellow leaves’ and ‘drifts of rotting vegetation.’ The Empty Moor As the travelers first emerge onto the moor, a landscape itself described as a ‘barren waste,’ ‘mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors’—’a cold wind [sweeps] down’ to meet them. Watson looks back at ‘the fertile country behind,’ where the sunshine makes the streams glow gold and the ploughed earth red. That reality dissolves into memory when faced with the ‘bleaker and wilder’ ‘olive slopes.’ Likewise, the ‘thick green foliage’ of ‘dripping moss and fleshy hart’s-tongue ferns’ gives way to a patch of ‘stunted oaks and firs which had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm.’ These descriptions do not merely fashion the moor as a rougher terrain; they envision it as another world entirely.

By alienating the reader from this fictive landscape, Doyle cultivates a stronger sense of mystery. Watson cannot get a clear grasp on this case because even the nature of the ground on which he stands eludes him. This continual uncertainty provides room for the novel’s supernatural elements to flourish. Hell hounds cannot exist in London but maybe—just maybe—they can exist here. Superstition and fact merge into a continuum that neither Watson nor the reader can untangle. Only the super-human rationality of Sherlock Holmes can clear a path through that haze. The moment that Holmes arrives on the scene, coincidences solidify into consequence, mischance into evidence.

Simply compare Watson’s description of the ‘fine net drawn round [them] with infinite skill and delicacy, holding [them] so lightly that it was only at some supreme moment that one realized that one was indeed entangled in its meshes’ (Ch. 11) and Holmes’ emblematic ‘fixing the nets’ to catch Stapleton. The more perplexing and unearthly Dartmoor appears, the more impressive becomes our level-headed protagonist in returning it to order. Doyle purposeful delays Holmes' arrival in the novel to emphasize this contrast between terror and terra firma. Perhaps all manner of tourism seeks to achieve the same goal of grounding the mysterious that Holmes accomplishes here.

The distance that Doyle forces between the narrator and the countryside emphasizes the layers of perception at work in this novel. While Doyle drew on genuine folklore and a few visits to Dartmoor to write this novel, he approached the moor as an outsider. His exploration of that craggy landscape in turns becomes Watson’s investigation of the same. By reading this novel and exploring Dartmoor for ourselves, we add yet another layer of outsiders looking past outsiders into a strange, perhaps, sinister world.