Despite the gloomy looking forecast myself and Will decided to brave the Dartmoor weather in hope of a couple of nights on Dartmoor and a days worth of hiking. Now this holiday has been a year in the making as I wanted to go in summer 2017 but after that didn't happen I wasn't going to let the weather stop us going this time.
Things weren't looking all that hopeful on the drive down when we hit low cloud and masses of fog as soon as we were nearing Princetown...as in you could barely see 5 metres in front of us in some places. So yeh that was fun (Sorry Will for making you drive in that!)
We set up camp in a campsite owned by the Plum of Feather pub which is a field behind it, had dinner and went to bed hoping we'd be able to see the following day for our hike.
It wasn't until 11 o'clock the rain eased off and we braved the outside world to reveal that the fog had marginally lifted.
So after altering the exciting hike that I had originally planned we decided to do two separate smaller walks. One on lower ground in a forest to wait out some of the fog and then hope it cleared for the afternoon to go out on the 'proper' moors.
Walk one: Bellever Forest - Bellever Tor - Bellever Bridge
I'm so glad I managed to drag Will to this bridge. It's one of my favourite spots on Dartmoor; it really makes me miss Ten Tors 45 and 55 catching sunrise here.
Walk two: Little Mis - Great Mis - North Hessary - Hollow Tor
The Fog cleared! HORAYY! It turned into such a beautiful day and we had a really good hike. Now just to give you a little more insight into how bad the weather had been before on the leg to North Hess we bumped into a man walking who came up to us and said:
"by any chance have you seen a red tent around here?"
to which we replied with "No"
He said, "I put it up last night and then went to get some water from the river and when I came back up to look for my tent I lost it in the fog. I had to walk back down and sleep in my car!"
After 5 tors we decided to call it a day and head back to camp. We were originally planning to stay another night but after looking at the weather for Monday night reading 60mph winds and LOTS of rain we decided to pack up and grab a meal in the pub and head back home
That concludes this blog post. I had a great time away (thanks Will for coming along and driving us in the Fog) and was wonderful last holiday for this summer before I head back to uni on Saturday.
I hope you enjoyed this post, thanks for reading :)