Oscar Fox’s short film is an ode to Cornwall’s longest living letterboxer

Growing up in Devon, the designer and film-maker Oscar Fox heard of letterboxing from a very young age. The puzzle-solving outdoor hobby is populated by a community of locals to Dartmoor that hide and follow clues to “little boxes, little pots, hidden under rocks, banks and roots of trees,” says Oscar. “You’re bound to come across these hidden treasures on any walk across the Moors, but I never realised the rich history and dedication from those that are involved.”

Each of these boxes contain two things for the travellers that discover them: a rubber stamp and a visitors book. Once uncovered, letterboxers make an impression of the box’s stamp in a notebook or on a postcard of their own for their personal collection, and mark the visitor’s book with their own – an exchange of impressions. “Letterboxers have been placing and searching for these hidden treasures across the vast landscape of Dartmoor for over one hundred and fifty years,” Oscar shares.

When he’d come up with the idea for the short film, Oscar decided to dig a bit further into this niche Dartmoor-ish interest to see if something might come of it. Reaching out on Facebook groups, the filmmaker got a response (amongst many others) from someone called Richard Elliott, a man who turned out to be Cornwall’s longest living letterboxer – finding his first letterbox in the 1960s. Richard shared that he had been “doing it the longest and still going strong”, Oscar says. “With a statement like this, I knew that the project had to centre around Richard’s commitment to his lifelong hobby.”

So with an interview with Richard already underway Oscar planned to shoot his short documentary Where the hand of man hath never trod the following weekend. Travelling to Richard’s home in St Austell, in just one day he was able to archive his entire stamp collection – documentation that would become a seminal part of two publications that the designer later crafted to accompany the film. The next day the pair were up and out in the early hours of the morning to reach Dartmoor, where they were then joined by Richard’s friend Linda for a day of letterboxing. “Before we started, I said to them, ‘just pretend I am not here!’”, he says. “I was a little worried that they might have been wary with the camera following them all day, but they just cracked on with their walk like every other week. It was great.”

The following shots capture Richard and Linda moving across a vast empty landscape in search of hidden boxes, punctuated by Richard’s spoken reflections on this lifelong hobby. For a final day of shooting on the Sunday, Oscar travelled back up to the Moors, this time a focus on simply “capturing the magnificent landscape”, finding a number of still and slow moments through the lens that would become integral to the meditative pace of the film’s final cut. As a backdrop for the shoot, the designer describes the landscape as “a complete escape and a step back from day-to-day life”. Through these longer takes on the moors Oscar wanted to connote the sense of quiet that completely “engulfs” the two walkers. “The low contrast colour grading and stripping the audio to a minimum, further added to a calming tone,” he says.

The slow pace of the short sits hand in hand with the thoughtful publications that Oscar designed around it. They include Richard’s personal stamp collection from all the walkers he met over the years and a book of prose, written by himself and fellow letterboxers. Currently, Oscar has made a single copy to accompany the film at exhibitions, but the aim is to produce “several pocket-sized variations that can be distributed at Dartmoor’s next annual letterbox meet and possibly some shops local to the area”, he says. “The material documented is a significant part of Dartmoor’s history that I think many would cherish.”

On the lessons he learnt from deep-diving into the world of letterboxing in the films making, Oscar shares: “It was a reminder to get out and step away from the overbearing, digital world that we live in, at least for a little bit. Seeing Richard and Linda only use traditional technologies, such as the compass and physical map, shows the art of this hobby has barely changed from how it was a hundred years ago and it’s refreshing to see,” he ends. “On a local level, I hope the film will spark an interest for more people to start letterboxing.”