How Dartmoor Shapes the Mystery in The Hound of the Baskervilles

In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Dr. Watson can see a man clearly enough to describe how he stands, yet the moonlight that outlines him also leaves his face in darkness. A sighting that vivid ought to settle something. Instead, it gives Watson one more question to send Sherlock Holmes.

That is how Arthur Conan Doyle makes Dartmoor part of the detective story. From a distance, firm ground looks much like a bog, a cry can travel farther than its source can be seen, and a man on a hill can look more like a figure from a legend than a person with a reason to be there. The moor shapes the evidence Watson can collect and the explanations he is willing to entertain.

This close reading discusses early and middle chapters and leaves the solution unspoiled.

The Grimpen Mire makes local knowledge matter

In Chapter 7, Watson looks over the flat ground near Merripit House and thinks it would be a fine place for a gallop. The naturalist Stapleton points out that the bright green patches Watson takes for fertile ground mark the Great Grimpen Mire. When a pony sinks into the bog, Watson sees what his first impression missed. Stapleton also tells him that he knows a route into the mire and back. Two people can stand at the same spot, look across the same ground and see entirely different possibilities.

That moment changes how you read every journey on the moor. When Watson wonders how someone got from one place to another, the distance on a map tells him only so much. A route that looks easy may be impassable, and someone who knows the ground can go places a newcomer would never think to look.

Watson can see the man on the tor. Who is he?

In his second report to Holmes, Watson describes a solitary man outlined against the moon on a granite tor. He has enough detail to be sure he saw somebody and to distinguish the stranger from the man he and Sir Henry have just chased. Sir Henry suggests the figure is a prison warder, a plausible guess given the search for an escaped convict. Watson wants more evidence. The terrain and light have given him a good view of the stranger’s outline and very little else.

The reports in Chapters 8 and 9, followed by a diary extract in Chapter 10, let us follow Watson’s thinking before the clues come together. His account of the man on the tor is especially revealing. He records the stranger’s posture with care, then imagines him as the spirit of the moor. Both belong in the report. One tells Holmes what Watson saw. The other tells us how it felt to see it.

The Baskerville legend gives an unfamiliar sound a familiar meaning

Watson knows the family story before he hears a cry on Dartmoor. By the time he tries to account for the sound, he and Sir Henry already have a story that could explain it. That is part of the legend’s power. It offers a ready answer at the exact moment when distance and darkness make an answer hard to check.

On a first reading, watch for the moment a character supplies an explanation for a sight or a sound. Ask what a second witness could confirm. On a reread, return to the Grimpen Mire and the man on the tor. Pay attention to who knows the paths, who can see whom, and how little Watson needs to misjudge for a plausible story to take hold.

For a spoiler-free verdict on the novel as a whole, read our review of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

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For a print copy with explanatory notes, see the Penguin Classics paperback of The Hound of the Baskervilles on Amazon, edited by Christopher Frayling.

Primary text · The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapters 7–10, at Project Gutenberg

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