Back to Exmoor, scene of prep-school rides on rough ponies

I am heading to Exmoor for the first time since I was last there in 1977 — and as the train pulls into Tiverton Parkway station my childhood rises back up at me like ground rush.

We head north and pass Ravenswood, the gothic building where I spent six years of my life when it was still a prep school. And suddenly I am back on the same road we’d take on Thursdays, in a van heading up to a farm on the moor’s edge. Back then, 43 years ago, a shaggy-haired farmer’s boy called Kevin would lead us out hacking on rough ponies across the heather and marshes.

In winter months, mists and rain hugged the pagan landscape, and even in summer, curtains of cloud swept across the gorse and granite. As we rode, our guide would tell us ghost stories about phantom riders, about Jack-o’-lanterns — the souls of dead, unbaptised children that lured you towards boggy drownings — and then there was the Hairy Hand, a disembodied thing that lurked on remote moors, waiting to leap on lonely dog walkers.