Arthur Conan Doyle

Say you walk on Dartmoor and there is a fair chance the first thing anyone says back is Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, or Conan Doyle himself. Of everything ever written about this moor, nothing has travelled further than the fortnight Arthur Conan Doyle spent walking it in 1901.

Doyle met Devon journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson in July 1900, coming home from the Boer War on the same ship. The following spring, on a golfing holiday in Norfolk, Robinson began telling Doyle the ghost stories he had grown up with on the edge of Dartmoor, including a legend of a phantom hound. Doyle went to see the moor for himself, staying partly at Robinson's own home and partly at Rowe's Duchy Hotel in Princetown, within sight of the prison. He wrote to his mother that June: "We did 14 miles over the Moor today and we are now pleasantly weary."

The visit produced The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialised in the Strand Magazine from August 1901 and published as a book in March 1902, dedicated to Robinson: "It was to your account of a West-Country legend that this tale owes its inception." Doyle had no other documented residence or long-term connection to Dartmoor. This one research visit, and the friend who guided it, is the whole of his link to the moor, and arguably the single best-known thing about it to people who have never set foot here.