Monday 2nd January 2012
John Lloyd Warden Page in An Exploration Of Dartmoor And Its Antiquities, second edition published in 1889, noted “Shortly before the opening of the railway from Okehampton to Lydford, the coach was crossing in the twilight hour a part of the Moor near the latter village. Suddenly the driver exclaimed in accents of unmistakable terror, “There! there! do you see that?’ pointing to an animal keeping up with his vehicle; “it is the black dog that hunts the Moor!’ To escape the phantom hound he lashed his horses into a gallop, and the creature, whatever it may have been, for in the gathering gloom its form was ill-defined, was soon left in the rear. [J.F. Wilkey, Report of Committee on Devonshire Folklore, Trans. Dev. Assoc., vol. xii.] That so cosmopolitan a being as the driver of a stage-coach should be affected by such an ordinary incident as the appearance of a dog by the side of his team may well be wondered at.”
Danny Howell writes: “Thanks to film and television, there can be only a few people today who haven’t heard of The Hound Of The Baskervilles, a Dartmoor-located story penned by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1902, involving his celebrated fictional sleuth Sherlock Holmes. The dog with huge jaws and small, deep-set cruel eyes, which ‘plagued the family’ is described as ‘a foul thing, a great, black beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon,’ and ‘not a pure bloodhound and . . . not a pure mastiff; but . . . a combination of the two – gaunt, savage and as large as a small lioness.’ ”
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), writing in June 1929 and referring to his novel The Hound Of The Baskervilles, stated “It arose from a remark by that fine fellow, whose premature death was a loss to the world, Fletcher Robinson, that there was a spectral dog near his home on Dartmoor. That remark was the inception of the book, but I should add that the plot and every word of the actual narrative was my own.”