Gnarled oak trees on Wistman’s Wood, Dartmoor.

It’s hard not to think that magic happens in places like Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor. This is one of the listed sites of special scientific significance as it is home to a rare Horsehair lichen (Bryoria smithii) which is only found at one other site in the UK.

The gnarled interlocking branches of this ancient oak grove feel like they are whispering their secrets together, which are kept by the bearded lichens hanging from the trees. Apparently if the air is polluted these fragile horsehair lichens shrivel up and die.

There were plenty hanging from the branches on the day we visited as part of our excursion onto the moor in search of Nancy Holt’s Trail markers. Artists Nancy Holt and her husband Robert Smithson walked through the moor in 1969 when she took a series of photographs of the orange way markers along the trail. The twenty photographs she took were a document of her journey through the landscape and they are not presented in the consecutive order of her walk.

Most of these distinctive orange dots have now worn off the boulders and gates that were once a part of the trail, but their evidence lives in her photographs. It was an interesting experience walking the path and thinking of the landscape through another artist’s eyes.

After scrambling over rocks we came to Wistman’s Wood with its distinctive moss covering the boulders and the sense of an other worldly presence so ancient you needed to be quiet to hear it whispering. Perhaps this could have been a place that inspired writers like Kenneth Grahame, Tolkien or CS Lewis - or maybe knowing that such places still exist we can dream ourselves into adventures great and small, imagining worlds where mythical pixies still sleep in the crevices between the rocks and come out to play.

Maybe all that is required is to strap on a back pack, dust off the boots and start walking in a spirit of childlike discovery, wayfarers all.