The Moor: Lives, Landscape, Literature – review

Rough, wild, cruel and semi-savage: the early reviewers who used these words of Wuthering Heights were also thinking of the landscape in which the novel is set. In popular mythology, moors are a bogland, a badland, an undiscovered bourn from which travellers risk failing to return. The final image of Emily Brontë's novel is of three headstones.

Brontë didn't see the moors as dread and drear, though, nor its bogs as a slough of despond. Even the headstones are touched by beauty: moths flutter around them and a soft wind breathes through the heather and harebells. For every detractor of the moors, there is an enthusiast; for every scare story – "As you value your life or your reason, keep away from the moor," Sir Charles Baskerville is told in Conan Doyle's novel – a paean to their dark allure. Ted Hughes wrote of "the empty horror of the moor" but his poems celebrate its denizens' stubborn survival.

William Atkins's interest in moorland began at the age of 14, with a GCSE geography project. Outside Bishop's Waltham, the Hampshire town where his family had settled, lay a pale, rough, uncultivated stretch of ground, no bigger than a couple of football pitches. Locals called it the moors. In reality, it wasn't a moor but fenland: fens are low-lying and saturated from below, whereas moors are high and rained-on. Still, Atkins was hooked, and 20 years later he embarked on a journey, or series of walks, that took him from the southwest (Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor and Exmoor) via the Pennines (Saddleworth and Haworth) to Northumberland and the Scottish border.

His book is an ambitious mix of history, topography, literary criticism and nature writing, in the tradition of WG Sebald, Robert MacFarlane and Olivia Laing. Though not driven by a psychological or emotional crisis, it does have an element of personal quest. "I wasn't looking for an answer to some question of the heart," he says, "it was just that the 'moor' I'd known and studied as a boy had promised something that the meadow, the pasture and the woods had not – if not 'heroic adventures', then a kind of answer to the portion of myself that remained uncultivated. Victorian travellers knew the Sahara's deepest interior as désert absolu … I'd take myself off and find my own désert absolu, the wild blasted moor."

In the event, we don't hear much about his uncultivated self, but we do learn a lot about moors: how widely they differ, despite their reputation for monotony; how many people you run into while walking across them, despite their seeming emptiness; how heavily contested they are, despite being deemed unfit for human habitation. He meets farmers, monks, ornithologists, gamekeepers, prisoners (at HMP Dartmoor), soldiers and walkers "for whom walking was not quite a matter of pleasure". He endures every kind of weather: snow, sleet, drizzle, mist, even sun. He steps by mistake in a peaty chasm, and stinking black water comes up to his waist. He stops to replenish himself with all manner of snacks: Cornish pasties, king-size pork pies, BBQ beef Mini Cheddars, fruit pastilles, strawberry Ribena, orange-flavoured Capri Sun.

The thing about moors, he writes at one point, is that their perspectives are lateral: there is no summit to reach; on the contrary, you know you are there when you stop climbing and flat land spreads out in front of you. The long views can seem featureless, but only if you're not looking properly. Atkins spots no Bodmin beast or giant cat, but he annotates bird and plant life in a kind of rapture: curlews, lapwings, golden plovers, skylarks and hen harriers; bilberry, cloudberry, asphodel, bell heather, peat-porridge, cotton grass and reindeer moss.

From the Romans with their lookout posts to the cold war radar stations at Fylingdales and Menwith Hill, the moor has always been a place to watch or listen for the enemy. But often the enemy is the moor itself, with its hidden hazards and unpredictable behaviour, including the bog-burst above Haworth in 1824 (less earthquake than landslide) that Patrick Brontë told his parishioners was a warning from God to change their sinful ways. Religion still has its place on the moor, with altitudinous abbeys and kirks. Politics leaves its imprint, too. There is no greater emblem of social division than the grouse shoot, with the underclass of beaters on one hand (poorly paid locals whose task is to flush out the quarry) and, on the other, the Guns waiting in their butts – sozzled toffs and City gents in gaiters and plus fours who fork out hundreds of pounds for the barbarous pleasure of bagging a brace.

Atkins goes easy on the Guns but he is not so tolerant of the artillery ranges and MoD encampments round Otterburn, Northumberland, where the military presence, all ugly signage and prohibition, robs him of the freedom he enjoys on other moors. Battles and skirmishes have a long history in this border region. And he can see why it is an asset to the MoD: where else in Britain can you safely fire your missiles over the horizon? But after hours of trekking along army roads, he is glad to descend to fields and villages again and "the welcome elbow of the particular".

The moors are traditionally where outcasts go – fugitives and misanthropes. With no one around to witness the act or the disposal of a body, they are also a good place to commit murder. Atkins recounts the story of Charlotte Dymond, whose throat was slit by fellow servant Matthew Weeks, with whom she had gone for a walk on Bodmin Moor in April 1844. ("I loved that girl as dear as I loved my life … then she said she would have nothing more to do with me," Weeks wrote, only half-repentant, before being hanged.) At the Moorcock Inn on Saddleworth Moor, a century before Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the innkeeper William Bradbury and his son Thomas were found battered to death – the culprits, allegedly three Irishmen, were never found, but after the killings the pub did a roaring trade.

One of the strengths of Atkins's book is its resistance to the obvious. He doesn't dwell on Brady and Hindley, or the Brontës and Top Withens, or the mass trespass on Kinder Scout, because those moorland stories are well known. And though he touches on all the famous moorland fictions – Wuthering Heights, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Jamaica Inn, Tarka the Otter, Kidnapped, The Secret Garden, Lorna Doone, Treasure Island – he gives more weight to authors few will have heard of, including Beatrice Chase, Canon Atkinson, Frank Elgee and Joan Rockwell, the last an American whose would-be wry account of living in the north of England he finds angrily defaced in the local library.

The poems of WH Auden and Ted Hughes are also crucial waymarkers – Hughes for his insights into the "slow heave, hill on hill" of the landscape round Heptonstall; Auden for his love of the North Yorkshire moors and the lead mining that once went on there ("Those limestone moors that stretch from Brough / To Hexham and the Roman Wall, / There is my symbol of us all"). Equally important is the example of a living poet, Tom Pickard, whom Atkins meets at the remote Hartside Cafe in Northumberland. Licking his wounds after his marriage broke up, and alone during the winter months when the cafe was closed, Pickard spent a decade there, taking perverse delight in the extreme conditions, whether the snow falling on to his bed from the cracks in a dormer window or the 128mph gale he drunkenly ventured out in wearing just a dressing gown.

Atkins is a bit of a poet himself, writing lyrically about the sights, sound and textures of his chosen ground. Soggy Exmoor is "a sponge squeezing itself, a waterlogged lung"; a new-born goat-kid is "rickety as a stool with a leg too short"; rain hitting his face is "the wave-slap of an angry sea"; a jet topping the horizon is "a cat mounting a fence". We are told how dogs on Dartmoor were once lawed – lamed, by the removal of three toes, to prevent them harrying royal deer – and treated to other rare species of moorland vocabulary: stuggy (thickset), griffs (gulleys), sawling or swiddening (the burning of heather) and causey paving.

An alert and knowledgable guide, Atkins is more interested in storytelling than campaigning. It is not as if the moors are so vulnerable as to need his protection. According to Defra, they account for 6% of England's total area, only marginally less than they did in the 19th century. Quad bikes and army jeeps might invade them, and farmers might attempt to cultivate them. But, despite all the draining, burning, grazing and road-building, the moors refuse be tamed.