Yew Alley is a wooded path beside the open moor, mapped by Sherlock Holmes as the likely setting of Sir Charles Baskerville’s final flight. Its narrow, tunnel-like passage and grassy edge shaped both the fatal pursuit and the misleading evidence left behind.

Setting and Map

The large-scale Ordnance map places Baskerville Hall amid surrounding woodland, with the moor to its right. Yew Alley is not marked by name: Sherlock Holmes infers that it follows a line shown on the map. The surrounding district is sparsely settled; the map places Grimpen within five miles of the Hall and Princetown fourteen miles away. Sherlock Holmes describes this stretch of moor as the stage on which tragedy has already been played and may be played again.

The alley belongs to a landscape that demands close knowledge to cross safely. Stapleton warns Dr. Watson that survival on the moor depends on remembering complex landmarks, and that an attempt to cross without that knowledge could be fatal. The warning underscores the difference between seeing the terrain on a map and being able to navigate it on the ground.

The Pursuit and Sir Charles’s Death

On the night of the murder, Stapleton brought his hound to the gate where he expected Sir Charles to be waiting. The dog pursued the baronet down Yew Alley; the wooded passage is described as a gloomy tunnel, giving the chase a confined route through the darkness. Sir Charles ran along the path, while the hound kept to the grassy border. At the end of the alley, Sir Charles died from heart disease and terror.

The hound’s route explains why the physical traces seemed to tell only part of the story. Because it ran on grass rather than on the path, no track of the animal was visible there. After approaching the body, it left a paw mark that Dr. Mortimer observed; Stapleton then called it away and hurried it to its lair in Grimpen Mire.

Evidence and Narrative Significance

Yew Alley makes the apparent supernatural pursuit materially possible while helping conceal its mechanics. The path records Sir Charles’s flight, but the adjacent grass hides the hound’s approach, so the known human tracks do not reveal the second pursuer. The paw mark offers a small, consequential trace, yet without the explanation of the dog’s route it cannot by itself disclose how the attack occurred.

The alley therefore serves both as a physical corridor and as an evidentiary problem. Its arrangement helps Stapleton make a staged killing appear inexplicable, leaving the authorities puzzled and alarming the countryside. When Sherlock Holmes reconstructs the pursuit, the route through Yew Alley connects the map’s broad landscape to the specific movements that produced Sir Charles’s death.