And I don't mean the people. I have been to England twice, but only to London, so I am not overly familiar with the geography of the rest of Britain. There is something atmospheric about this particular setting in books (which I also vividly remember in Wuthering Heights). The Baskerville family estate is located on the moor. This brief article talks about Dartmoor where the book is set. I had been imagining the moor to be up in the northern section of England, but in reality it is in the southwestern part. I would love to visit there someday. Masterpiece Theatre appears to have aired one of the many filmed versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and there is an excellent essay on the "Lure of the Moor" on the PBS website.
"The moor's atmospheric weather and desolate landscape lend an air of tragedy and mystery to all of these tales (referring to the works of Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and Emily Bronte), as they do to The Hound of the Baskervilles. On Dartmoor's windswept plain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle found the legendary roots and the creepy backdrop of his most famous story. He took many liberties, changing the names of geographic localities and altering distances to suit his story, but even today, Sherlock Holmes fans are known to set out across the moor in search of the real counterparts of the fictional locale where the story took place."
I like this description of the moor as well, where it is compared to the American West:
"For England, the turn of the 20th century was a time of great change. While London entered an age of electric light and the internal combustion engine, Dartmoor was more like the American Wild West -- bleak, inhospitable, and lawless. Dartmoor is a 20-by-30-mile tract of untamed wildness amid the Devonshire countryside. Watson's description of his inaugural drive into Dartmoor is rendered in such detail that it can easily serve as a road map for visitors today on the trail of Sherlock Holmes."
"Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage," notes Watson in chapter six of The Hound of the Baskervilles, "but behind the peaceful and sunlit countryside there rose ever, dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills."
I believe that there are times when the setting of a book is almost as important as the characters. Certainly The Hound of the Baskervilles would be lacking if it was set somewhere else--it wouldn't work really on the same level it does with such a setting. Can I give one more description from the book? This is from a letter that Dr. Watson sends to Holmes:
"My Dear Holmes,
My previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up-to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but on the other hand you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten fold, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their grey stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on the string of his bow, you would feel that his prescence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what always must have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy."
Can you tell I am rather enjoying Doyle's work so far?