In her early twenties, Daphne du Maurier had an eerie experience on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor, which gave her the bones for Jamaica Inn, one of her most popular novels. She owed her first sight of this now famous inn to a suggestion by her friend Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Q, as he was known, lived in Fowey, across the water from her Bodinnick home Ferryside. He was a Cornish writer and academic and something of a mentor to Daphne. In November 1930, he suggested that she and his daughter Foy should go on a horse riding expedition on Bodmin Moor and spend a few nights at a wayside hostelry called Jamaica Inn.

The Cornish Moors

As du Maurier explains in Vanishing Cornwall, most of the backbone of Cornwall consists of moorlands, from the source of the Tamar River in the north to the south-west, all the way to Penwith and the claw that is Land’s End. The greatest stretch of moorland, where Jamaica Inn lies, is a timeless place with abandoned mines and infinite open spaces, ‘a country of stones, black heather, and stunted broom.’

This is a ‘sacred’ or ‘ritual’ landscape, full of hundreds of stones that have been shifted to visually align with the moorland topography. There are ancient monuments here: the Hurlers, Rillaton Barrow, Trippet Stones, Leskernick stone circles, and numerous cairns, menhirs and settlements. Nobody knows the origins of these Neolithic monuments nor much about the people who so long ago managed to heave huge stones on top of others in what is now recognised as the very beginning of architecture.

In his book Rising Ground, Philip Marsden notes how the architecture ‘does not tell us what preceded it, what led to it, the centuries and centuries of story and song and memory, that poured over the site, and left no trace.’ Yet walking through this place there is the sense that the land still holds these ancient memories. Daphne keenly felt its mystery and later worked it into her novel: ‘there was a stillness in the air, and a stranger, older peace, that was not the peace of God.’

After walking for just half a mile on Bodmin you can become lost in a brown/green landscape stretching as far as the eye can see. The craggy granite outcrops and tors might provide some shelter in a shower, but they offer little respite from the chill winds that rise without warning, regardless of the season.

There are real perils here for the walker and horse rider alike. Near the highest tor on the moor, Brown Willy (from the Cornish bron wennyly, hill of swallows), the terrain is soggy and treacherous. Its stretches of darker green with tussocks of grass suggest firm ground to the uninitiated; yet underfoot it will sag and tremble, before sinking under water. Further down in the smooth pastures lie bogs and marshes that have swallowed sheep, cattle, people, whole.

Setting Out

Daphne and Foy took off on horseback from Jamaica Inn on an overcast afternoon, heading for Trebartha Hall, five miles east of the inn. They planned to call on an elderly friend, estimating the ride would take forty minutes. After tea they would return to the inn on a road that skirted the moor. Du Maurier later described their expedition through this moor as foolhardy: ‘I came unprepared for its dark, diabolic beauty’, she wrote.

Soon they would be experiencing the same plight as Mary Yellan, the heroine of Jamaica Inn who becomes lost in the moor and fights off mounting panic and a sense of dread. In the novel this young woman had honoured her mother’s dying request that she join her Aunt Patience and husband Joss Merlyn, the owner of Jamaica Inn. Mary first sees the inn on a raw wintry evening and meets her menacing uncle for the first time. The inn is dark and full of evil secrets. She finds herself very alone, in the midst of a forbidding land of bent and twisted trees, ‘marshland and granite’. Du Maurier incorporated into the novel aspects of her own experiences of the moor and this particular journey with Foy.

It was a cold grey day in late November. The weather had changed overnight, when a backing wind brought a granite sky and a mizzling rain with it, and although it was now only a little after two o’clock in the afternoon the pallor of a winter evening seemed to have closed upon the hills, cloaking them in mist. It would be dark by four.

Lost

An hour after leaving the inn, Daphne and Foy had come no closer to their destination. What had appeared to be a straightforward ride of some five miles over a plateau to the wooded hills of Trebartha and North Hill became impassable on horseback. As menacing crags and tors loomed up to bar their way, they resorted to a slippery downhill track, but it petered out beside a swollen stream. Daphne later discovered this was Withey Brook, that runs perilously close to marshy and boggy terrain. Typically for the moors, the sky had darkened and the black clouds that appeared above them burst. As Daphne described it, in a moment ‘all was desolation.’ The swollen stream became a torrent and to escape it they had to scramble uphill to an abandoned cottage. They were roughly equidistant from both Trebartha Hall and the inn, but many miles from either. Daphne, soaked and freezing cold, had ‘never known greater despondency.’

The wind tore at the roof, and the showers of rain, increasing in violence now there was no shelter from the hills, spat against the windows with new venom.

After an hour the rain slowed but now a blanket of dank mist had settled that would prevent them from finding their bearings. Foy, who was the better horsewoman, suggested their only hope was to let the horses lead them home. Daphne worried that the horses’ idea of home might be a thirty-mile trek to Fowey instead of the shorter journey across the moors to the inn, but there was little choice. They climbed into their saddles in darkness and in silence.

…the heavy fog clung to the ground, obstinate as ever, with never a breath of air to roll away the clouds.

After the cottage that had filled Daphne with despair, the open terrain came as a relief. The horses were making steady progress despite loose stones and heather, until they reached what appeared to be a disused railway. Foy said it was a trolley track for a stone quarry and they should dismount because if the horses strayed into the quarry, they could break their legs. ‘Bogs, quarries, brooks, boulders, hell on every side’, Daphne later wrote.

At this point she was reminded of a book from her childhood, Sintram And His Companions, about the journey of a despondent knight with the devil in disguise, called The Little Master. Its illustration depicted a terrified horse rearing near a precipice. This, thought Daphne, would be their fate at the quarry, and The Little Master would come to claim them.

But they managed to veer safely away from the tracks and after remounting, the horses moved forward more boldly. It was too dark to see their watches; it felt as if seven o’clock had become nine, and nine became midnight, while they pressed blindly on and on.

…Mile upon mile of bleak moorland, dark and untraversed, rolling like a desert land to some unseen horizon.

Found

Then Foy cried, ‘They’ve done it. They’ve done it…Isn’t that the road?’

Sure enough the Launceston to Bodmin road lay ahead and, incredibly, the chimneys of Jamaica Inn were just visible, looming out of the fog.

In the novel, Mary Yellan arrived at the inn in darkness:

Mary stood alone, with the trunk at her feet. She heard a sound of bolts being drawn in the dark house behind her, and the door was flung open. A great figure strode into the yard, swinging a lantern from side to side.

‘Who is it?’ Came the shout. ‘What do you want here?’

But for Daphne and Foy it was a different experience. They could see figures with lanterns; the people from the inn had begun to search for them. Their lamplight shone a warm welcome and instantly all fear, all sense of having been in danger disappeared. It was eight o’clock and the innkeeper and his wife had only just begun to worry. Inside was a much longed for turf fire, ‘brown and smoky sweet’, and a supper of bacon and eggs with scalding hot tea.

The Vicar of Altarnun

A year later the friends returned to Jamaica Inn and visited Dozmary Pool, and the village and church of Altarnun. At the church called St Nonna (also known as the Cathedral of the Moor) they met the vicar who called on them at the inn that evening. By the fireside they talked late into the night while he told them all about Bodmin Moor and the legends it had inspired. Daphne later used some of this material for Jamaica Inn. They learned that the inn’s isolation had made it an ideal halting-place for smugglers’ contraband, before it was shunted off to the larger Cornish towns of Bodmin or Launceston, then onto London or Bath. The contraband would usually arrive from the notorious smuggler’s cove of Polperro or the neighbouring coastal village of Looe.

Packages were brought by the wagons and unloaded at Jamaica Inn. They were stored in the locked room…as soon as the wagons were unloaded they would take their departure, passing into the night as swiftly and as silently as they had come.

When  Daphne was eight she had been given a copy of Treasure Island ‘and from that moment a whole new world awaited me. I soon had the first page by heart.’ She incorporated the story into imaginary games, becoming Jim Hawkins (with occasional lapses into Long John Silver) roping her sister Jeanne into playing Blind Pew.

Rereading it now, Daphne’s own tale of wrecking and smuggling began to take shape in her mind. The vicar from Altarnun had long white hair and as she crafted her characters she imagined him in a more sinister light, turning him into the albino ringleader of her novel.

We will visit Jamaica Inn another time to discover other aspects of the story and those fascinating moors.

Music

Ólafur Arnalds, Improvisions

Arnalds is a multi-instrumentalist and producer from Iceland – a crafter of delicate symphonies that leave spaces for rich imaginations.