HORROR & MYSTERY ON THE MOOR

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used Dartmoor’s mysterious landscape to revive Sherlock Holmes.

- DAVID CLAYTON

Few yarns over the past 100 years or so have quite captured the public’s thirst for mystery and skulduggery in the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles did, and, it must be said, continues to do.

Arguably the most famous book to ever be set in Devon, the county was far more integral to the story than many people may realise, inspiring Conan Doyle to perhaps his greatest work of fiction. It’s a tale most people are familiar with – the cursed Baskerville family, terrorised by a huge spectral hound, thirsty to avenge the dreadful deeds of previous generations, with twists aplenty.

For Conan Doyle, there was only one man to solve the case – the great detective himself, Sherlock Holmes. The only issue was, Holmes had been killed off eight years previously, so his creator decided to set the tale as a prequel to his demise at Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem.

News that Holmes would return for one more adventure caused great excitement and in August 1901 when the story was first serialised in The Strand, the publication saw its circulation rocket by 30,000. And The Hound of the Baskervilles didn’t disappoint, becoming Conan Doyle’s most successful story, spawning dozens of dramatisations and movies over the years.

But as much as the story is gripping, it is the atmospheric backdrop of Dartmoor that adds layer upon layer of intrigue and mystery. Shrouded in mist, the brooding moor, with its dramatic tors, outcrops and treacherous terrain is, in the hands of Conan Doyle, as terrifying as the hound from hell itself.