The most autism-friendly place in the world

The emptiness, silence and splendour of Dartmoor. Plus: news just in on what might soon happen to the Special Needs system

A couple of thing to start this instalment…

I’ll do a long and in-depth post soon about rumblings from Westminster and Whitehall about drastic changes to England’s Special Educational Needs system, which are now sounding more specific – and worrying – than ever.
Christine Lenehan, one of the government’s key Special Needs advisers, said this week that she is among people considering whether the Education, Health and Care Plans (or EHCPs) that currently set out children and young people’s provision as a matter of legal entitlements “are the right vehicle to go forward”. She also claimed that most kids with EHCPs “don’t need health and care” so much as “a really good, focused education”, and acknowledged that she is “in the middle” of ongoing conversations about whether EHCPs should be used in future mainstream education, and only apply to pupils and students in special schools.
This is all frightening stuff. In the wake of the announcement of all those cuts to disability benefits, it points to a possible phasing-out of children and families’ rights, which would profoundly change how SEND works, and call time on one of the few ways people can hold the relevant authorities to account. It also seems to be built on completely topsy-turvy logic: as many families with SEND children in a mainstream schools will know, it’s only EHCPs that make education in those settings possible. As I explain in Maybe I’m Amazed, that was certainly was our experience, for eleven years. Obviously, I’ll be following all this very closely. But for now, I’ll point you to a characteristically forensic piece on Special Needs Jungle.

Events!
I’ll be talking about Maybe I’m Amazed, music, autism, creativity and neurodivergence and much more at the Derby Book Festival on Wednesday March 28th at 5.30pm. Details here. On Saturday June 1st at 2.30pm, I’ll be doing the same with Simon Baron-Cohen at the Hay Festival. Info and tickets here.

You can buy Maybe I’m Amazed here.

Anyway…

Our first trip to Dartmoor was a matter of insanely bad timing. It was February 2020 - only a month before the start of the pandemic – and the UK was under attack from what my research reminds me was Storm Dennis (the menace). Perhaps because of this part of Devon’s famous micro-climate, what that meant for our half-term visit to the countryside around Okehampton was instantly clear: among the worst rain and wind I have probably seen, sometimes so extreme that it seemed grimly funny.

I didn’t have the experience of hillwalking that I have managed to acquire since, and I was also in the grip of the mindset some psychologists call Monotropic Superdrive, newly obsessed with Dartmoor and desperate to see it up-close. That meant two completely ridiculous attempts to do at least some walking. The first took us to a car park, where we watched two other bonkers people get instantly soaked, while the gales inflated their clothing and made them look like drenched human balloons (we instantly gave up, and went to see the first Sonic The Hedgehog movie). The second time, I insisted we try and climb up a modest-looking hill to have a look at the famous Scorhill stone circle, whereupon we were instantly blown back down, with the constant sting of high-velocity hailstones as an added bonus.

A word of advice, then: always check the weather, and know when to bow out. But on the third and final day, we actually made it somewhere: around the Fernworthy Reservoir and through the woods to the two stone circles known as the Grey Wethers. It wasn’t raining that day – much – and I can clearly recall the moment which started an addiction that hasn’t subsided since: when I turned around, looked North (yes, I had a map and compass), and took in a huge and bleak expanse of emptiness, seemingly without end.

If you can boil Dartmoor’s basic allure down to one thing, this is it. Just look:

I know: to some eyes, the moor is a bleak and soullless place, and this might look like something close to hell. To state the blindingly obvious, it looks like it does thanks to human intervention: had our ancestors not hacked down most of the trees, it would be a much more green and comforting place, with abundant flora and fauna. But Dartmoor grips some people’s souls, I think, because it delivers experiences that are vanishingly rare: isolation, silence, and the chance to leave behind the cacophonies and distractions that constantly intrude on our lives.

We now go whenever we can. My son James, whose autism means he luxuriates in the quiet and calm of the best outdoor spaces, is just as keen on Dartmoor as me, and now well-acquainted with whole swathes of it. As a matter of instinct, he instantly seemed to grasp how to interact with its landscape: the fact that its rocky tors are there to be climbed, that the views its peaks deliver on clear days are profoundly mood-altering, and that there is an inarticulable thrill in long hours spent walking around it.

In Maybe I’m Amazed, there’s a passage about watching him soak up a view of Great Langdale in the Lake District:

Without any prompting, James marks the halfway point by purposely walking twenty yards off the path, towards a solitary outcrop. For twenty minutes, he then sits alone, looking out over Great Langdale, slowly shifting his attention from side to side, in complete stillness and silence… I think I understand what he is luxuriating in: there are no human interactions to negotiate, and no prospect of police sirens, dogs, or hand-dryers – just infinite space, and the sense of being one tiny part of a serene and spectacular whole. As much as when he is playing or listening to music, this experience seems to go right to the core of who he is, and when he is most authentically himself.

This is what happens whenever we go to Dartmoor.

The spark for this post was a very good new book: Rock Idols by Sophie Pierce and Alex Murdin, which evokes and explores the moor by zeroing on 28 of its tors, exhuming some of the literature and art it has inspired, and presenting some of Alex’s brilliant drawings of its landscape. Dartmoor, they write, is “all about dirt and drama, mud and magic”. They describe “dim shapes looming dark and cold out of swirling mist; blue shadows melting into a river of bluebells; hazy stacks shimmering under an adder-baking summer’s sun.” It’s all there, but what they keep coming back to are those rocky summits, their anthropomorphic features, and their mixture of “familiarity and granite inhumanity”.

The book is the same dimensions as most walkers’ guides. It’ll fit snugly into the outside pocket of a rucksack. Rock Idols will be coming with us on our next trek, very soon.

Current listening!
Album: Ian Hunter, Defiance Part 2: Fiction (2024). Tracks: Jeff Finlin, Sugar Blue (2001?); Tom Misch, Red Moon (2025)

P.S I’m now on Instagram as johnharriswriter. Here’s James playing The Clash’s Career Opportunities on the organ at the former United Reformed Church (now the Rye Bakery) in Frome:

johnharriswriter

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