My Dutch guests are mostly huge, not very witty, and arrive waving the same guidebook as every other Dutch visitor, together with a pair of those pointy walking stick things.  They have all come here to ‘hike’ across the moor. But when they discover that our paths are neither gravelled nor signed – well around here they don’t actually exist at all – they tend to lose their nerve, and resort to one of the two walks described, presumably in Dutch, in their guidebook.

Which means that if you ever venture out to Bench Tor, as I did with the Dartmoor hunt yesterday, you’ll come across thousands of Dutch people all going around in the same circle, having beaten a path for themselves over the past few years with their silly sticks.  A bit like the way you have to queue up nowadays to climb Everest, using its pre-existing steps and ropes (admittedly passing the odd corpse as you go).

The other walk listed in that wretched guidebook is the one to the miniature oak trees that comprise Wistman’s Wood. Two bumpy miles in a straight line, there and back, from your car.

Well I’ve only ever met one Dartmoor resident who’s bothered to go and have a look at Wistman’s Wood.  I’ve just ridden around it, as horses are too big to get in.

“Is it worth the effort?” I always enquire, vexed, after my so-called hiking guests have got into their hired Fiat 500, parked at The Two Bridges and had a coffee there (instead of at my mates’ Prince Hall Hotel, 200 yards away) and followed the well worn path, bumping into other Dutch people as they go.

The whole point of my B&B is that, unlike any other that I know of, you can walk in every direction, North, South, East and West, from outside my garden gate, as advertised in the first sentence of my website.  That is my USP.  That is mostly why I charge a lot.  When I get guests determined to leave their car in the drive, and, direct from my door spend the entire day trekking 20 miles across every kind of terrain and lots of rivers to the Warren House Inn, or who are thrilled to risk getting lost on their way through pouring rain to the utterly bleak, featureless Ryder’s Hill, I feel like kissing them.

Over breakfast we pore over the Ordnance Survey map which I’ve drawn all over with biro, showing them my suggested walks.  I’ve even had a bespoke map made with Wydemeet at its centre, and hung it on the wall, so that guests can get a better idea of where we live.

The irony of all this is that I never actually walk anywhere myself at all.  I am less fit than a Londoner commuting to work by tube, who goes on foot along the pavement at either end of his or her journey.  Because the whole point of horses is that you can sit down as they negotiate the hills.

And now, oh Lor – I’ve discovered E-bikes.