Baskerville Hall & Grimpen

(Contains Spoilers!) 

 After Dr. Mortimer came to consult Sherlock Holmes on the death of Sir Charles Baskerville and the legend of the hound, Holmes "... sent down to Stamford’s for the Ordnance map of this portion of the moor...  I flatter myself that I could find my way about.” Using a similar map, I have labelled points of interest so we all may be as well familiarized with the moor as the London detective. The map can be found at the bottom of the page.

No. 1 Baskerville Hall If Sir Henry is correct, ...the same hall in which for five hundred years my people have lived, then circa 1400 AD would mark the hall's origin. Baskerville Hall sat in a cuplike depression, patched with stunted oaks and firs which had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm.  It had two high, narrow towers, wrought iron gates, with weather-bitten pillars on either side, blotched with lichens, and surmounted by the boars’ heads of the Baskervilles. In the front drive old trees shot their branches in a sombre tunnel over our heads ... The whole front was draped in ivy, with a patch clipped bare here and there where a window or a coat of arms broke through the dark veil.

No. 2 Yew Alley A well-known walkway lined with soft gravel eight feet across and a six-foot stretch of grass on each side. This alley was enclosed on each side with an impenetrable twelve-foot high yew hedge, "... with the moor, as you perceive, upon the right of it..." When Sir Henry first arrives at the main gate of Baskerville Hall, he looks up at the long dark drive and asks Dr. Mortimer, "Was it here?" in regards to where his uncle died. Mortimer replies, “No, no, the Yew Alley is on the other side.” 

No. 3  Wicket-gate or Moor-gate ... a white wooden gate with a latch ... is halfway down the Yew Alley and leads onto the moor. The gate was only four feet high... low enough for a large hound to leap over. It was here that Dr. Mortimer suggests that Sir Charles stood smoking a cigar on the fateful night of his death. "... Then, again, whom was he waiting for that night, and why was he waiting for him in the Yew Alley rather than in his own house?”

No. 4 Sir Charles's dead body was found near the end of the Yew Alley. "... Sir Charles lay on his face, his arms out, his fingers dug into the ground, and his features convulsed with some strong emotion..." It was determined that he ran from the gate to this spot. "... he ran with cries for help in the direction where help was least likely to be ...." Dr. Mortimer observed the marks of a great hound about twenty yards from  Sir Charles's body. The body lay fifty yards from ... an old tumble-down summer-house ... at the far end of Yew Alley.

No. 5 Lafter Hall The house of old Frankland the litigant, who lives four miles to the south of Baskerville Hall. From his telescope on the roof, Franklin could see a boy (Cartwright) taking supplies to someone (Holmes) at Black Tor.

No. 6 Merripit House "There is a house indicated here which may be the residence of the naturalist—Stapleton, if I remember right, was his name." Merripit House is a bleak moorland house, once the farm of some grazier in the old prosperous days, but now put into repair and turned into a modern dwelling. An orchard surrounded it, but the trees, as is usual upon the moor, were stunted and nipped, and the effect of the whole place was mean and melancholy. A wall and an outhouse sit out behind the house.                                  

No. 7 Grimpen "... This small clump of buildings here is the hamlet of Grimpen, where our friend Dr. Mortimer has his headquarters...."  Watson visited the postmaster in Grimpen. 

No. 8 Coombe Tracey Franklin's daughter, Laura Lyons lived and had a typewriting business in Coombe Tracey. Holmes stayed for the most part at Coombe Tracey while on the case, and only used the hut upon the moor when it was necessary to be near the scene of action.

No. 9 Black Tor A tor is a hill or rocky peak. Watson went to Black Tor to discover the stranger seen there. Holmes had a temporary hut on Black Tor to be close to Sir Henry and to keep an eye on Stapleton.

No. 10 Cleft Tor Is where Selden the convict was hiding, hardly a mile or two from Baskerville Hall where Barrymore signalled him with a candle in the window. Watson and Sir Henry went to Cleft Tor one night to capture Selden. It was then they heard a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing. Selden hurls a rock at them, and they pursue. The two see another man silhouetted against the moon. Selden likely lost his life near Cleft Tor.

No. 11 Prehistoric Settlement ... grey circular rings of stone, a score of them at least... they are the homes of our worthy ancestors...    “Neolithic man—no date.” Stapleton pointed out these stones to Watson while on the moor. Later Stapleton leads Sir Henry and Watson to this spot where Sir Hugo was to have met his end. ... a short valley between rugged tors ... stones, worn and sharpened at the upper end until they looked like the huge corroding fangs of some monstrous beast.

No. 12 Fernworthy A village that had little love for Franklin who thought nothing of closing off land where they liked to picnic. 

No. 13 Grimpen Mire A mire is swampy or boggy ground. “A false step yonder means death to man or beast...  It’s a bad place, the great Grimpen Mire... there are one or two paths which a very active man can take...” Stapleton kept the hound in an old tin mine at the centre of the mire, and the mire is where Stapleton met his end. Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire, down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in, this cold and cruel-hearted man is forever buried.

No. 14 The Hound Attacks Sir Henry  It was on this spot Sir Henry was attacked by the hound on the moor path. Sometime after 10 p.m., the Baronet left Merripit House and started off for home. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog. ...we heard scream after scream from Sir Henry and the deep roar of the hound. ... But the next instant Holmes had emptied five barrels of his revolver into the creature’s flank. ...The giant hound was dead.

 Ordnance map of the moor with additional notes

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Sherlock Holmes Chase Scene

 While rereading  The Sign of Four (1890) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I was struck by the chase scene on the Thames as Holmes & Co race after Jonathan Small and his crew. This may have been one of the first high-speed chase scenes in English literature. Both boats, steam launches, were reputed to be the fastest crafts on the Thames. The chase cannot compare to, let's say the scene in Bullitt, but it does have a sense of excitement and danger as bullets and poison darts fly. 

What makes this chase scene interesting to me is the number of landmarks Doyle uses. I counted no fewer than eleven. Not being familiar with the Thames I decided to label them tracing the chase. The map can be found at the bottom of the page.

No. 1 7:30 pm Holmes, Watson, and Athelney Jones board a police boat at Westminster Wharf near Westminster Bridge across the river from Lambeth. Today there are boat tours that embark from Westminster Pier and travel downriver. 

... we had been shooting the long series of bridges which span the Thames. Some of these would be Waterloo, Blackfriars,  and London Bridge. 

No. 2 As we passed the City the last rays of the sun were gilding the cross upon the summit of St. Paul’s. St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral was built between 1675-1710. It is one of many London landmarks. I have a photograph of my father in uniform in London during the war standing on Blackfriars Bridge with St. Paul's in the background. 

No. 3 It was twilight before we reached the Tower. The Tower of London is another famous landmark tracing its history back to 1078. William Shakespeare made reference to it a number of times. People were imprisoned in the Tower and some met their deaths there. The last Tower execution was in 1941.

Jacobson's Yard, the fictitious boat repair yard where the Aurora was secreted, was across from the Tower.

Here, Holmes, Watson, and the police waited for the Aurora to show herself. Holmes commented on the workmen leaving at the end of the day. “Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him. You would not think it, to look at them. There is no a priori probability about it. A strange enigma is man!”

They spot the Aurora and the downstream chase begins. We were fairly after her now. The furnaces roared, and the powerful engines whizzed and clanked, like a great metallic heart. Her sharp, steep prow cut through the river-water and sent two rolling waves to right and to left of us. With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing.

A tug and three barges allowed the Aurora to pull ahead two-hundred yards. 

No. 4 Our boilers were strained to the utmost... We had shot through the Pool... The Pool of London is a stretch of the River Thames from London Bridge to below Limehouse. This was as far upriver as large sea-going vessels might travel.

No. 5 ... past the West India Docks... A series of three docks dating back to 1802.

No. 6 ... down the long Deptford Reach ... The strait between the two bends in the river.

No. 7 ... and up again after rounding the Isle of Dogs. A large peninsula formed by the bend in the Thames. It had been an important centre of trade.

No. 8 At Greenwich we were about three hundred paces behind them. Greenwich is notable for its maritime history and for giving the name to the Greenwich meridian (0°longitude) and Greenwich Mean Time.

No. 9  At Blackwall we could not have been more than two hundred and fifty. Blackwall on the north bank before the bend in the river. Until 1987, Blackwall was the centre of shipbuilding and repair. 

Steadily we drew in upon them, yard by yard. In the silence of the night we could hear the panting and clanking of their machinery.

No. 10 ... with Barking Level upon one side ... At the time it was a largely uninhabited area of the north bank below the Albert Dock.

No. 11 ... and the melancholy Plumstead Marshes upon the other ... Uninhabited low-land in the north-eastern part of Woolwich. The land was not particularly swampy but its tendency to flood on very high tides meant that the land was unstable and it remained mainly open and unused right up until the 1960s.

... the wooden-legged man threw himself upon the rudder and put it hard down, so that his boat made straight in for the southern bank, while we shot past her stern, only clearing her by a few feet. We were round after her in an instant, but she was already nearly at the bank. It was a wild and desolate place, where the moon glimmered upon a wide expanse of marsh-land, with pools of stagnant water and beds of decaying vegetation. The launch with a dull thud ran up upon the mud-bank, with her bow in the air and her stern flush with the water. The fugitive sprang out, but his stump instantly sank its whole length into the sodden soil. In vain he struggled and writhed.

I calculate that from the Tower to the marsh by boat is about 14.5 km. or 9 miles. According to Small, he started dumping the Agra treasure about halfway through the chase.

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