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He ramped up our mood of chain-smoking nervousness by telling me a little about his experiences of the folk of Dartmoor. One time, he’d visited Wistman’s (or Wiseman’s) Wood, a grove of ancient oaks near the beginning of the route and – as its name implies – a place of celebrated magic. There he was greeted by a pack of aggressive folk, warning him away with spears and sticks. After much negotiation, he persuaded them that he came in peace, and they changed instantly into garrulous hosts, escorting him around the wood and showing him all their favourite places. As for the famous pixies (or piskies), he said, they’re not the cheery little imps that you’ll find leering off the shelves in the local gift shops, but blueish creatures that are ‘very spirited’, and not always terribly friendly. He’d warned me before that they were particularly fond of cake, so I’d baked a bara brith at home and brought it with me as an offering, worrying only slightly that it was culturally inappropriate to give Welsh delicacies to Devonian piskies. Should I try and rustle up a clotted cream tea for them instead? Woody told me to stop taking the piss.

We drove both cars the hour’s journey down to Lydford, leaving mine in a small army car park on the moor’s western edge. The drive to Powdermills, our starting point, seemed an awful long way. To the left, the moor looked gaunt and grim, even in the evening sunshine, but nothing compared with the shock of HMP Dartmoor, the most notorious prison in Britain, suddenly looming large and brutal on the horizon. At last, we coasted into Powdermills, parked and set off, giggling a little too shrilly at our crap jokes.

Even though the Lich Way is closed more often than not by army manoeuvres, the path is a fully fledged right of way. And despite countless times when I’ve learned how untrue it can be in reality, I still found myself looking at the map, tracing the green dashed line and believing in it. Paul Devereux’s words of warning about its lack of definition and all-round difficulty were easily drowned out in my mind by the authoritative voice of Ordnance Survey, my much-flawed god. Will I never learn? On the map, the path looked plaintively lonely, edging out over tussocky contours and with only the odd stream and rocky tor to break the monotony, or indeed to navigate by.

At the first tor after Powdermills, Longaford Tor according to the map, we stopped to attune ourselves and make our offerings to the folk. Woody said that he’d already clocked a few interested heads poking up to check us out as we passed by, and when we made the offering, they clustered around. My bara brith was deemed acceptable, apparently, and we gave them a drizzle of tea from our flask to wash it down. They prefer booze, I was told, but sweet tea was a reasonable alternative. The tors, those glorious piles of granite that look as if they have been placed with artistic precision by Andy Goldsworthy or Nils Udo, rippled across the landscape ahead of us, like wave crests atop a swollen green sea. Suddenly I realised that this route was as dangerous, and unpredictable, as the ocean itself.

As the sun slid down in a sultry haze, the temperature barely dropped at all. I was sweltering, the sweat dripping off my nose as we pushed on down into a valley and back up again to the next tor. This was the pattern for miles: you never reach any momentous height, but the constant up and down, through wiry grass and sudden pools of rusty water, was absolutely knackering. The day’s over-consumption of fags was also weighing heavy on us both.

My God, but it was impressive. We sat on one tor, having a bit of food and drink, as the sun sank towards the north-west. Ten minutes before it disappeared, I looked around to the opposite horizon, and there was the freshly risen full moon, briefly the sun’s identical twin. Both were pink and hazy, squashed at the extremities, one leaving, one arriving, and sharing just the most fleeting moment of perfect synchronicity. We sighed,