Boxing with Mark & Sue
Reprint of the Original Smithsonian Article entitled "They Live and Breathe Letterboxing"
Published in the April 1998 edition of Smithsonian Magazine by Patrick Ward.
"They Live and Breathe Letterboxing"
AN OBSCURE GROUP OF INTREPID COLLECTORS GIVE THIS ENGLISH VERSION OF ORIENTEERING THEIR HEARTY STAMP OF APPROVAL
ADRIAN
WILLIAMS IS AN ENGLISHMAN WITH A MISSION you might call an obsession:
to find plastic containers that are hidden under rocks. He is in his
early 40s, and carries on with a bluff manner and considerable energy.
He has worked as a garage manager, a nurse and a Web-page designer but
devotes his free time almost entirely to this pursuit. The hidden
containers--they're known as letterboxes--are scattered through the
wild country of Dartmoor National Park, a vast region of high, barren
hills in the southwestern English county of Devon. Adrian is one of
several thousand people who have taken up the search for them. He told
me that when he moved from London to Devon a few years ago, he'd never
heard of letterboxing . Now, whenever he can, he leaves home early to
get to the moor, comes back late and spends his evenings on the phone
talking shop with other "boxers," or entering new clues into his
computer database. "I live and breathe letterboxing ", Adrian said.
"It's a way of life for me, and I'm not the only one." Letterboxing is
something between a sport and a hobby, sort of a combination of
orienteering ( Smithsonian , June 1992) and treasure hunting that
consists of using maps, clues and compasses in the search for
containers. Each letterbox contains a notebook and a unique rubber
stamp. Each letterboxer carries a notebook and a personal stamp.
Once
a box is found, a small ritual called "stamping up" is performed. The
letterboxer inks the stamp from the box and presses it into his own
notebook, then inks his personal stamp and presses that into the little
visitors' book that's kept in the box. It's double proof that he's
found the box. The stamp copy he takes home is the reward for his
effort. Then the letterboxer reseals the box, replaces it in its hiding
place, checks the clue sheet and the compass beatings, and heads off in
search of the next letterbox.
There are thousands of boxes
hidden on Dartmoor. They've been put out a few at a time by
letterboxers themselves. The whole thing goes on without any governing
body or official sanction. It came into being spontaneously, and it's
the people who participate that keep it going. Anyone can go
letterboxing , any day of the year.
Adrian, his wife, Melissa,
and their children, 11-year-old Tegan and 8-year-old Ben, were heading
out one Saturday last November, and they invited me along. On our way
from the Williamses' house, in the town of Okehampton, to Dartmoor, we
drove down lanes in the Devon farm country so narrow that ferns growing
out of the stone walls brushed against both sides of the car. We
eventually went through a gate, followed a track to the edge of the
moor, where we parked, and started hiking up a boulder-strewn hillside.
Some shaggy cattle ambled off before us.
Adrian said that when
he gets in a new place, it takes a little while for him to get a feel
for where things are and how to interpret the clues. Before long, he
announced that we were in an area that was heavily salted with
letterboxes. (It should be pointed out, however, that someone who was
not looking for them could hike on this hill for years and never see a
letterbox.) He read from a set of clues: "Hut at 113 degrees. Cairn
at 108 degrees." He looked around and located what he thought were the
hut and cairn referred to in the clue. The cairn was just a hundred
yards up the hill; the hut was more than a mile away.
Adrian
judged where he would have to put himself so that his compass readings
to those two landmarks would match the ones specified in the clue.
"Should be just over that way", he ventured. Melissa had a somewhat
different idea about where those bearings would cross, but she only
rolled her eyes and said to me in an undertone: "How many letterboxers
have divorced over a difference in bearings on Dartmoor?"
In a
couple of minutes, Melissa pulled the box from under a rock, and we all
settled on our haunches to stamp up. Most letterboxes are actually pill
bottles--plastic screw-top containers, about three inches in diameter
by four inches high, that were originally used to supply pharmacists
with wholesale quantities of pills. These are weatherproof, plentiful
and free for the asking. We had our first box of the day, and Adrian
announced, "We're off. Now we're in form."
The British are known
for eccentricity, but letterboxers, one aficionado told me not long
before I went afield with the Williamses, are the greatest eccentrics
of all. They trace their curious pastime back to 1854, when a Victorian
gentleman walker put his calling card in a bottle and stuck the bottle
into a bank at Cranmere Pool in a remote part of Dartmoor, Other
walkers who found the bottle also left their cards, and perhaps a
postcard that the next walker could carry off the moor and send back to
its owner. In 1894, a letterbox appeared at Belstone Tor. (A "tor" is a
hill marked by a rocky outcropping. There are about 140 on Dartmoor.)
In 1938, another was placed at Ducks' Pool.
As late as the
1970s, there were only a few dozen letterboxes on Dartmoor, though by
then rubber stamps had replaced calling cards and postcards. In the
past couple of decades, the number of boxes has exploded, while at the
same time boxers have tried to keep the whole thing quiet. Most
letterboxers live in Devon, though some come from other parts of
England and a few even come from other parts of the world.
With
the exception of a compass and the rubber stamps, there is refreshingly
little gear to buy. The only "currency" is the clue sheets that lead to
newly placed boxes--the owner can exchange these for clue sheets
leading to other people's boxes. An organization called the 100 Club
publishes a catalogue of some of the letterbox clues. These clues don't
exactly pave the way to the letterboxes. Here are a couple I picked at
random from the catalogue:
"Favourite Lunch Spots No. 22.
Shapley Tor. Lone tree by road 312 degrees. Huge square boulder 346 1/2
degrees. Hut circle 277 1/2 degrees."
"Reynard's Happy Hour.
Bellever 341 degrees. Hay Tor 51 degrees. Track disappears over hill
101 degrees. Under large rock half covered with heather."
And
just to spice things up, some clues include cryptic references, or come
in the form of anagrams. The 100 Club sells patches that advertise that
the wearer has found 100 boxes, 500 boxes and so on.
The rubber
stamps used in letterboxing have become increasingly (and
competitively) elaborate. Many boxers put out series of stamps that
commemorate some aspect of Dartmoor. Adrian has just put out a series
on places with local bird names, called "Dartmoor Most Fowl." Roger and
Stephanie Paul of Denbury have put out a series called "Dartmoor
Farmers, Past and Present." Some artistically inclined boxers carve
their own stamps out of rubber blocks; these "handcuts" are especially
sought after.
By the time Adrian and Melissa had found that
first box, we'd come well up the hill. Looking back, I could see the
green and hedged farm country just below us. Farther off was t he city
of Plymouth and the entrance to Plymouth Harbor. As I watched, the
distant mist rose, revealing a silvery sheen on the water of the
English Channel. The clouds above it looked ominous.
But the sun
was shining where we were. It was a good area, and there were boxes to
find. We worked our way to the top of Stalldown Barrow, picking up five
or six more boxes in the next hour. Only once did we see another
walker, several hundred yards off Adrian guessed that she was a
letterboxer; she veered away when she saw us.
In fact,
letterboxers seldom cross paths out on the moor, though the keen ones
get to know each other nonetheless. When they find a box, they look to
see whose personal stamps are already in the notebook. Being first in
the visitors' book carries high prestige. Though they may never meet or
even know each other's real names, the regular group all know each
other by the nicknames on their "personals," which often include a play
on the boxer's name or hometown: the "Topsham Torists," the "Dartmoor
Carterpillar," the "Plymstock Soggy Soxers." The Williamses' personal
reads "Have Feet Will Travel."
The typical letterboxers are
probably a family with children who have gotten their hands on the 100
Club's catalogue and have trekked out to the moor with a compass and a
picnic lunch for a day of fresh air and adventure. But a small group of
the keenest boxers also go after "word-of-mouth" boxes. These are
letterboxes that aren't mentioned in the catalogue and whose owners
circulate the clues only to other insiders.
A strict protocol
applies to clue exchange. One never asks for another's clues. You can
offer your clues, but only if you've been around long enough to have
the idea that your clues will be accepted. The exchange of clues often
starts at the pub and continues by mail. Adrian checked the clue sheet
we were using that day, and said that we should head over to the
northern side of Stalldown Barrow and down into the valley.
As
we walked, we could see a row of standing stones left by prehistoric
people. Some of the ponies that wander free on Dartmoor had worked
their way among the stones, and from where we were, clumps of ponies
and the standing stones alternated across the horizon. We walked on
till we came to the steep slope on the far side of Stalldown Barrow.
The River Erme snaked through the valley at our feet. A "tail" of white
water marked each boulder in the river. Up the mottled slope on the far
side of the river, more than a mile away, we could see a farmer on an
all-terrain vehicle herding sheep. With the help of a pair of energetic
Border collies, he gathered the sheep toward the corner of an ancient
stone wall. We could just hear his shouts to his dogs, and the sheep,
which had been scattered specks on the hillside, coalesced into pools
of white with tributary streams.
But we weren't there for
sightseeing--there were boxes to find. We slogged our way down the hill
(Dartmoor is almost uniformly wet underfoot) to a rocky gully called
Smuggler's Hole. It was another rich area for letterboxes. Adrian and
Melissa found a couple of boxes by using clues. Tegan found a couple
just by looking. "That's two to Tegan," Adrian called. "Come on, Ben,
you're lagging." Adrian checked through the notebook that he'd taken
from one of the boxes we'd found. He recognized all the stamps.
"It's
the usual gang," he said. Then, using the felt-tip markers he had
brought for just this purpose, Adrian spent a good ten minutes coloring
this stamp--it was a picture of a swashbuckling smuggler--so that he
would have a particularly attractive copy for his collection. Some of
the more serious letterboxers like to take copies of stamps on note
cards, which they later sort and mount in binders. "When you look at
your collection of stamps on a winter's evening," Adrian said, "it
gives you something to remember: who you were with, and how you found
it." We got a few more stamps in the gully before the storm that I'd
seen earlier out on the English Channel broke over the top of Stalldown
Barrow. Gusts of rain started to lash us. Even Adrian, who had told me
earlier that a letterboxer's unfailing motto is "Just one more box,"
admitted that it was time to quit. We pulled up our hoods, put our
heads down to the storm and followed a trail along the River Erme back
to the car.
Once in the car, Adrian and Melissa looked through
the stamps we'd collected, a total of 20. They included pictures of a
fox peering from its den, a row of standing stones (a handcut), three
different versions of smugglers and a female short-eared owl. There was
also a stamp commemorating Her Majesty's Customs and Excise service; it
was found in a letterbox hidden under a rock overlooking Smuggler's
Hole. The verdict on the day? Not bad.
Pat Clatworthy has
collected thousands of stamps in her 18 years of boxing, though she
goes out only on weekends. Pat is a trim, vigorous woman of youthful
middle age who works for the emergency-preparedness office of the Devon
County Council. She agreed to take me out one day in sunny weather that
contradicted Dartmoor's reputation for rain and gloom.
Pat
started off at a brisk pace, providing a commentary over her shoulder
as she walked. " Letterboxing seems to satisfy a lot of human traits,"
she said. "It gives a sense of adventure, a sense of achievement and
satisfaction to collectors. You're pitting your wits against someone
else's. And it's a great leveler: you'll see a doctor out talking over
clues with a Boy Scout. I think it's good for the Boy Scout, and it's
especially good for the doctor."
We passed Nun's Cross Farm, one
of the old Dartmoor farms that's been abandoned this century, a victim
of the poor, acidic soil and the harsh climate. Using i he stone cross
and a fir tree for bearings, Pat soon located a box. With the alacrity
that comes of long practice, she unloaded her pack for the stamping up:
a plastic pad to sit on; two plastic containers filled with cards, ink
pads, markers and her personal; a notebook wrapped in a plastic bag;
and a thermos of tea.
"Coming out for a day of letterboxing is
like planning a battle campaign," Pat said. "I'd feel lost without my
pack of gear." (Pat is also a World War II buff) Her other crucial
piece of equipment is a golf club handle minus the head. She uses it to
probe for boxes under rocks and in mossy banks, and as a walking stick.
She pokes ground that looks soft before she steps. "It stops you from
walking into suspect bits," she said.
We rambled on for several
miles, finding boxes here and there, until we reached Ducks' Pool, the
second-most-famous site on Dartmoor after Cranmere Pool. At neither of
these locations is there a pool, nor much of anything to distinguish
the area from the miles of surrounding grassland, other than its
letterboxing history. These are the sites of the two letterboxes that
are shown on the,map of Dartmoor. And on the ground, small monuments
make the letterboxes impossible to miss.
Plenty of people around
Dartmoor think these should be the only two letterboxes. The very
eccentricity of letterboxing seems to breed suspicion among people who
don't participate. This comes out, partly, in accusations that
letterboxers trample vegetation and disturb antiquities. For their
part, park officials have responded by consulting with boxers and
publishing a code of conduct--which seems to be well heeded. I noticed
that boxers don't mind pointing to the damage done by foxhunters and
trail riders. The horseback riders point at mountain bikers and hang
gliders.
The farmers who have rights to the common grazing land
on Dartmoor (they're called "commoners") worry about recreational users
disturbing their livestock. Few people seem happy about the presence of
the military, which trains regularly on Dartmoor. A park ranger I
talked to said that a big part of his job is balancing the claims of
various users--a job made somewhat trickier by the fact that the land
within park boundaries in Britain remains in private ownership. I heard
a cockeyed rumor in a pub one night that the Prince of Wales, who is
the largest landowner on Dartmoor, wishes that the whole place would
become a strict nature preserve. I quickly got the impression that
whichever group of users was looking at Dartmoor could see very clearly
the damage--real or supposed--that every other group was causing. It
was not long before I got a taste of this myself.
Using compass
bearings, Pat and I came to Ducks' Pool across an unmarked grassy
plain. We hadn't seen another person for hours, but as we approached we
saw a man coming from the other direction, apparently also making for
Ducks' Pool. I hung back a bit, to observe this meeting. Pat kept to
her own business, avoiding conversation. I finally came up and the man
hailed me cheerily. He looked to be about 60, and had a rosy complexion
and white hair. He told me that he'd just walked eight miles, and there
was sweat on his brow to prove it. "This your first time here?" he
asked. Well, that's a friendly opening, I thought, but I had misjudged
my man. He turned out to be an anti-letterboxer on the lookout for a
victim. I had walked into his trap.
"Look at this photo." He
thrust it under my nose. It showed three young women having a picnic by
the Ducks' Pool rock. "This was taken in 1957. Look at the erosion
that's been caused by letterboxers since then. The ground around the
rock was way up here, then. Look what's been lost!" Pat started to say
something about natural erosion, but the man would have none of it, and
continued his harangue. Finally, he seemed to have judged that he had
browbeaten us into submission. He glanced at his watch. "Twelve miles
to go," he said. "I'd better be off if I'm going to make it home by
teatime." And away he strode over the hill.
Even
though letterboxers tend to avoid each other on the moor, a group of
them congregates every Wednesday evening at the Dolphin Hotel in the
town of Bovey Tracey. It's a friendly, noisy gathering, and a good
place to hear letterboxing stories. I met Godfrey Swinscow, who seems
to be the unofficial godfather of modern-day letterboxers. He told me
that he'd found his first box in 1935. " Letterboxing is better than
watching the telly," Godfrey told me. "It keeps the boys out of the
pub, and the girls from chasing the boys." Not that Godfrey minds some
good fun. I heard about a practical joke that some still-undiscovered
boxers once played on him. He went out one day on the promise of
finding a new box with an especially nice stamp. Along the way, he
collected a series of notes with progressively outlandish directions.
Being a good sport, he followed the directions until eventually he
ended up walking across the moor, dressed in a frock and bonnet,
chanting, "I believe in fairies and pixies."
I heard about the
boxer who had let it be known that he was planning to set out a new box
at a certain spot at midnight on New Year's Eve. When he got to his
spot, 45 minutes late, he came upon three cars full of cold, impatient
letterboxers waiting in the dark for the chance to be first in the book.
Chris
Jones told me that he thought there were maybe 60 to 100 "hard-core"
letterboxers. "A lot of other people do it for their kids," he said.
"That's fine. I won't decry that." But only a hard-core boxer would put
himself in the position that Chris did one day. He needed two more
boxes to complete a series and found himself on the wrong side of a
river on a day when the rain was "bucketing" down. He and his partner
walked along the riverbank for a mile, looking for a place to cross.
"The river was in full spate, really flowing," he recalled. "Finally we
just waded in, went up to our thighs. As wet as we were, what had we to
lose? And how would we ever live it down if it got around that we were
beaten by a little bad weather?"
Earlier, Pat Clatworthy had
presented me with a North Dartmoor Official Passport, a whimsical
document that ensured my protection from "Pixies and many other
obscurities." In spite of that small honor, I got the feeling people in
the pub were keeping an eye on me, not in any hostile way but out of a
concern that my presence might foretell the arrival of crowds of
heavy-footed "grockles"--a word from Devon for people who aren't.
A
day later, I was alone on the moor, a clue sheet (solemnly lent to me
by Adrian) in one hand, the map of Dartmoor (it measures approximately
three by four feet when unfolded) in the other. I checked the sheet and
found a set of clues that started from the eastern corner of the
abandoned Doe Tor Farm. I located the farm on the map, hiked up there
and read the clues.
"Go 132 paces on 107 degrees to tree." I
aligned the compass with north, took a sighting on 107 degrees, and
there was a gnarled hawthorn tree. My spirits rose. Adrian had warned
me that "paces" is a notoriously subjective unit of measure, but 132 of
my paces brought me to within a few feet of the hawthorn. I felt like a
child playing find-the-thimble when everyone starts shouting, "Warmer,
warmer!" Last clue: "Box is 12 paces from tree on 280 degrees in
clitter" (a Devon word for a jumble of broken rocks). Standing next to
the tree, I used the compass to find 280 degrees, took 12 steps in that
direction and looked down. My eye caught a hint of something
man-made--the box. I took a copy of the stamp. My first solo letterbox!
Then
I checked the clue sheet and found one of Adrian's boxes listed. I knew
he'd be pleased if I stamped his book, so I decided to try for it. Here
is the clue, verbatim: "Dartmoor's Lost Unicorns No. 5--Hero, 5377,
8473, Have Feet Will Travel, FP 205 degrees. Cross 18 1/2 degrees.
Large chimney on farm 241 degrees. Tip of dead tree 315 1/2 degrees.
Tip of pointed rock 70 degrees and 9p away. Under rock on edge of
clitter." The name of the stamp comes first: Dartmoor's Lost Unicorn
No. 5--Hero. Adrian's code name is Have Feet Will Travel. The two
four-digit numbers, 5377 and 8473, are the map-grid references; using
them, I got myself into the right neighborhood.
Once I was in
the right neighborhood, the stone cross on Brat Tor was the most
obvious landmark. Again aligning my compass with north, I walked across
a hill 40 or 50 feet until the cross bore on 18 1/2 degrees. Now I bad
a line from me to the cross and beyond. I knew that the box had to be
somewhere along that line. To find it, I needed to determine where
another bearing in the clue crossed the line. I knew that "FP" stood
for flagpole. I looked in the direction of 205 degrees and saw some
vague smudges in the distance that might have been flagpoles. Or might
not. I decided to try another landmark. "Tip of dead tree 315 1/2
degrees." I could see a cluster of trees around Doe Tor Farm a mile or
so to the north, and one of them looked dead. I walked several hundred
yards downhill, all the while keeping the cross on 18 1/2 degrees until
the dead tree was on 315 degrees. Good. I was standing at the
intersection of those two bearings. The only trouble was, I was out in
the middle of a grassy area, far from the edge of clitter. Obviously, I
had picked out the wrong dead tree. Back to the clues.
"Large
chimney on farm 241 degrees." I peered in the direction of 241 degrees.
Ahh! Miles away, almost lost in mist, was a blocky shape that might
have been a farmhouse. I couldn't make out a chimney, but this was the
only possible choice. To put that farm on 241 degrees, I had to walk
back uphill. That would return me to the clitter, which was good, but
it would leave my precious dead tree way off the mark.
I walked
up the hill, using the compass to check the stone cross and the
farmhouse until I thought I was at the spot where their bearings
crossed. I looked for a dead tree somewhere around 315 degrees. There
were a couple of trees in the distance on the far bank of the River
Lyd, but neither of them was close to 315 degrees, and neither appeared
to be dead. So, what about that other clue--the pointed rock nine paces
away on 70 degrees? I was surrounded by pointed rocks; it was the Times
Square of pointed rocks. But as I was looking around, I saw, maybe ten
feet away, a five-foot-tall dead tree. Adrian, you crafty bloke! Two
steps put it on 315 degrees. A few minutes later, I pulled out the
letterbox.
I couldn't find the next two boxes at all, but then I
got two in quick succession. The next one would have taken me back up
Doe Tor. By then the sky was getting "dimpsey"--another of those Devon
words. I hadn't seen a soul in many hours, and no one in the world had
a clue where I was. I gave up the idea of "one more box" and started
back. Pausing on the side of High Down, I looked across the valley. It
was a bleak, empty scene. As I stood there, a gibbous moon came over
the shoulder of Doe Tor.
I had been out with Adrian near Doe Tor
a few days earlier. We had stopped for lunch on the side of a hill
called Great Kneeset. Through a notch on the horizon between Lints Tor
and Black Tor we could see a bit of the lowland England where people
live and work. "People down there, busy, busy, busy, rushing around,"
Adrian mused. What we could see of Dartmoor, on the other hand, was
empty but for the two of us.
For millennia, the wet bleakness
had kept people away. Traces of the few who had ventured onto the moor
were still visible: the tinners had left piles of tailings; farmers had
left stone walls; soldiers had left some rough roads and bomb craters;
religious people had left standing stones and carved crosses. And, of
course, letterboxers had been there, too. By then I knew that out in
the wild country before us were thousands of pill bottles hidden under
rocks. "It's a funny world," Adrian said, "isn't it."
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