West of Exeter is a large national park called Dartmoor. It is perhaps best known outside of England as the setting for several famous books, most notably the Hound of the Baskervilles. I’ve wanted to visit it ever since I first came to Exeter. This past weekend I braved the limited bus service and set off with some friends and my trusty Ordnance Survey map. (I love OS maps. They are amazing, documenting every aspect of the landscape including public trails and archaeological features, no matter how small. And they have been doing it for decades, which makes them an invaluable archival source for historians and archaeologists. But I digress.) Our plan was to do a 13 km archaeologically-themed walk, visiting some stone circles and other prehistoric features.
As wild and open as it might look, the park is actually one giant culturally modified landscape. You basically can’t spit without hitting something archaeological (although I wouldn’t recommend it with the winds that blow up there). Everything from Bronze Age menhirs (standing stones), circles, stone rows, and stone hut circles, to Iron Age settlements and field boundaries, abandoned medieval villages and bridges, evidence of tin mining from all periods, and historic remains. We were spoiled for choice, so I chose a walk off the internet that looked like it hit a lot of interesting (and atmospheric) sites.
We got off the bus at Warren House Inn, a pub quite literally in the middle of no-where.
Middle of nowhere (for southern England, at least)
The morning was quite blustery with some drizzle, but we had come prepared. The drizzle drizzled out (although the wind kept up), and the sun occasionally broke through the clouds. We hiked up to our first goal, a large cairn, called King’s Oven, a name derived from the proposed remains of a tin smelting hut.
From here we set out northeast, in order to find our next goal, a supposedly very well-preserved double stone row, with a large standing stone at the end. Well, I thought we set out in the right direction. I did have my compass in my backpack, but I figured: “How hard can it be to miss a line of rocks in a big, open grassland?” Obviously, not that hard. I blame it on the fact that I was distracted. First, by the overwhelming joy of being in such a huge, open, space again, with a big sky overhead, and not another human in sight (well, except for the other members of our group). I was having serious flashbacks – rolling hills of grass and scrub, stone circles (okay, a bit different than North American stone circles), clouds scudding across a big sky, leading a group of people in search of sites. It all seemed vaguely familiar.
Second, I was also distracted by the floofy sheep, scattered around the heath with their cute little lambs. (Yes, I know I’ve been in Britain over a year, where there are more sheep than people. But they are still novel. I don’t get out much, ok?)
Mama sheep and her new spring lamb in the heath
Did you know that from a distance, grazing sheep have an uncanny resemblance to squat standing stones? By the time I got to what I thought was the stone line, it had ambled away. Looking at my map, I realized that we had somehow missed the line, and it was too late to go back and try to find it. (The bus schedule to Dartmoor was rather limited: one bus into the Park in the morning, and only one bus back at 4:30 in the afternoon. If we missed that bus…)
I have to admit I was rather disappointed. From then on I carried my compass in my pocket. But my glumness was short-lived. We came upon a small herd of Dartmoor ponies. These tough little horses are iconic of the Park. They are the descendents of the ponies used in medieval tin mining and possibly even earlier periods. Today they live in a semi-wild state, ranging across the Park. However, they are not shy, as this curious one demonstrated. They are their own recognized breed (although to be registered, the pedigree has to be known). They do have owners, and during an annual round-up, called a “drift”, owners check their health and herd status, and select out animals to sell.
Curious Dartmoor pony
The trees that you see behind the ponies was Fernworthy Forest, our next goal. The term “forest” is a bit of a misnomer – a better description would be conifer plantation. It was created in the 1930s, when England was worried about running out of resources. When I first saw it on Google Earth during my research for the walk, my initial reaction was “what a terrible blot on the natural grassland landscape!” But it is just part of a very, very long history of human management and alteration of the landscape. The “natural grassland landscape” is, in fact, not natural at all. Like the “forest”, it is also an artifact of humans mucking about. Archaeobotanists (my tribe!) and paleoecologists have determined from pollen cores that much of Dartmoor was originally covered by highland oak and hazel woodland. This woodland began to be cleared by Bronze Age farmers for pasture. Clearing continued throughout prehistory. There are two or three tiny patches of the original oak forest left, and I hope to visit one of them in the near future. In the pictures I have seen, they look like something straight out of Tolkien. As I mentioned earlier, what appears as a wild and windswept wilderness is actually what we would call a “cultural landscape” in anthropologist/archaeologist-speak, created by millennia of repeated human occupation.
The forest/tree plantation wasn’t nearly as sterile as I anticipated, and although the trees were all the same age, there was still a nice tranquility in the moss-covered floor.
As we proceeded, this tranquility gradually broke down a bit, as we discovered yet another (contemporary) cultural use of the landscape – a weekend rave in the middle of the forest. We didn’t actually see the rave, but the small clusters of exhausted looking teenagers walking towards us (some with face paint), the ambulance and police presence, and the distant thumping music were all pretty good indicators.
We made our way to the Fernworthy Stone Circle (aka Froggymead) in the middle of the forest. Thankfully they hadn’t planted trees on top of the monument, and by all accounts, the stones are still in their original positions. We enjoyed some lunch, listening the sound of the wind blowing through the spruce trees, tempered by the sound of the distant thump-thump-thump of the rave – the modern version of what people were probably doing in and around the stone circle 3000 years ago. Excavations at the circle found a large amount of charcoal in the centre of the circle. Bonfire, anyone?
Lunch at Fernworthy stone circle
We continued on, out of the forest and back into the grassland. Parts of the moor were crossed by old stone walls called reaves, that seemed to go on for infinity. The people who built them certainly didn’t lack for raw materials; there were outcroppings of weatherworn granite everywhere.
Our next stop was the Grey Wethers double stone circles. The centre points of these two stone circles are only 3 degrees off a perfect north-south axis, and this might be the result of them having been restored by well-meaning Victorian amateur archaeologists in the late 1800s.
A legend says that the name comes from a prank played on a boastful new farmer who was drinking at the Warren Inn pub one day. He made it clear he wanted to become the most prosperous farmer on the moors, but was disappointed at the quality of sheep he had seen at the market. A local man offered to sell him a high quality flock grazing nearby. Being suspicious after his experience at the market, the inebriated farmer wanted to see them first. So the seller led him out on the cold and foggy moors, and from the ridge, the farmer could see a fine flock grazing in the mist. But it was cold, the inn was warm, and the cider tasty. The farmer paid the man, and went back to celebrate his purchase. But the next day when he went to collect his new flock he discovered that what he had seen in the mist of the moor (or more likely the mist of cider) was two circles of stone. Wethers is another name for sheep. See?!? I’m not the only one!
Tiny (less than 1 cm long) blue flowers of Heath Milkwort
We continued on, past some Bronze Age hut circles which I completely missed (How could I miss them? They are much more substantial than tipi rings…), and along a tributary of the East Dart river. Along the path I heard a cuckoo (my first!), but unfortunately couldn’t determine where it was. At the confluence with the main river was this small beehive hut (missing its roof). I don’t know the age of this structure, but it may have served as a temporary shelter for a shepherd, a tinner (tin miner), or a peat cutter sometime in the past.
Beehive hut
Many of the hills of the moors are capped with large, weather-beaten granite outcrops called tors. Some, like Haytor, are large enough to attract weekend-warrior rock climbers. They are quite evocative and iconic of “wildness” of the moor landscape. Hartland Tor above the hamlet of Postbridge is one of the smaller ones, but still commands stunning views. It is hard to show in a picture the gale-force wind that was trying to blow us off the top of this ragged cluster of rocks, but it was wild and wonderful.
Hartland Tor
We ended our walk in Postbridge, with enough time to stop at the shop for an ice cream, and have a look at the old clapper bridge before the bus came. These bridges were built during medieval times, formed by placing large slabs of stone on stone piers. Only a few survive today.
Clapper bridge at Postbridge
It was a fantastic day, other than feeling a bit rushed because of the rotten bus schedule. But the buses have now changed over to the summer schedule, which means there will be a few more options. I look forward to going back and poking around all the other sites along the way we just didn’t have time to see. And exploring the rest of Dartmoor. Rest assured, we’ll keep doing bits of the coast as well. And then there is the entire north coast of Devon, and Cornwall, and the Brecon Beacons, and the Lake District, and…
So much to see…
Outside Observer 