Walk the Hound of the Baskervilles, Baker Street to Dartmoor

From Baker Street to the moor

A country doctor brings Holmes a walking stick, a family legend and a set of footprints nobody wants to name. The case runs two hundred and fifty miles west to a moor Doyle had tramped himself, and Holmes spends the best of it hidden in a prehistoric stone hut, living on tinned tongue.

The case leaves London on the ten-thirty from Paddington and runs west on the Great Western line to Devon, then out onto Dartmoor on foot. Doyle wrote it in 1901 after travelling that way himself with the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who gave him the legend. Grimpen, Coombe Tracey and Baskerville Hall are invented, but they are pinned onto a real moor, and Bematist walks them there.

Much of the moor in the book is still there. The prehistoric hut circles where Holmes hides out are real; Grimspound has two dozen of them inside a stone wall. The great Grimpen Mire is usually identified with Fox Tor Mire, and Coombe Tracey with Bovey Tracey. Doyle gives no mileage, so the 250 miles here are measured along the railway and across the moor.