Feel the rush – the everlasting resource of national parks:
Step this way for the highest, wildest ground in England’s southwest; a hearty Devonshire stew of nature, folklore and history. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Dartmoor.
IT WAS FORGED 280 million years ago, deep inside the Earth’s crust; a vast bulb of mineral-rich molten rock muscling its way up into layers of slate and sandstone. After cooling, fracturing, eroding and submerging in the aeons that followed, it was ready for unveiling: the phenomenal granite plateau we call Dartmoor.
That’s the condensed, in-a-nutshell version anyway. And it wasn’t the end of the slow cooker saga that shaped Devon’s central uplands. Ice ages came and went. Plant life colonised its thin soils, caking all but the knobbly high points in peat. Then, around 10,000 years ago, people turned up and began to mould the moor to their liking, clearing trees and creating the distinctive landscape we know today. By the twentieth century, calls to preserve it were gaining traction and on October 30th 1951, Dartmoor began a new chapter as Britain’s fourth national park.
It’s often hailed as southern England’s ‘last great wilderness’, but scratch the surface and there’s very little about the moor that hasn’t been manicured, mined or tinkered with by humans. Yet it’s this curious blend of mankind and Mother Nature that makes Dartmoor such a fascinating place to explore on foot. The home of letterboxing and Uncle Tom Cobley, it has also inspired many artists and writers over the years.
A great swathe of the park’s north and former royal hunting forest – about 50 square miles that includes its 2039-foot summit, High Willhays – falls within the Army’s Dartmoor Training Area. But limited access in parts aside, there are massive upsides to walking on Dartmoor too. 50% of the park is classed as Open Access land, where walkers enjoy the right to roam. It’s also unique among England’s national parks in being the only one where you don’t need permission to wild camp in certain areas of open moorland, so long as you leave no trace (see dartmoor.gov.uk/ camping).
Dartmoor’s best parts are to be found around the edges, on its brackeny limbs and in its many creases; among the haymeadows and woodland gorges. ▶
Plymouth
Dartmoor National Park
Exeter
It’s where the characterful villages nestle, and ancient sites like Grimspound and Merrivale Warren. Dartmoor is renowned for its quirksome churches too, from Widecombe’s ‘Cathedral of the Moor’ to St Michael de Rupe on Brent Tor. St Winifred’s at Manaton is another slendertowered beauty and it’s the starting point for a walk that has it all; a greatest hits yomp in a wonky figure-of-eight around eastern Dartmoor.
South of the village the ground sweeps up from the valley to the clitter-strewn bracken of Hayne Down and one of Dartmoor’s most-recognisable rock formations – a 21-foot stack of weathered granite called Bowerman’s Nose. Side-on it resembles a flat-capped gent with an impressive conk and scowling expression. And like so many of Dartmoor’s enigmatic tors, there’s a ripping good legend behind the name.
The story goes that Bowerman was a well-liked and fearless hunter, but one fateful night as he pursued a hare into a narrow valley with his pack of hounds, he unwittingly came upon a coven of witches in mid-Sabbath. Enraged by this intrusion, the witches hatched their revenge. Disguising herself as a hare, one led Bowerman on a relentless chase across the moor... straight into a trap. Cackling as they did so, the witches cast a powerful spell, turning the exhausted huntsman and his dogs to stone where they stood on Hayne Down. But the story doesn’t end there. Aghast at their friend’s terrible fate, the people of Dartmoor vowed to drive the witches out of Devon forever. The witches upped broomsticks and took flight across the Bristol Channel, where it’s said they started the fashion for pointy hats among the womenfolk of Wales.
Tacking south from Bowerman’s Nose, there are more jumbled shapes arrayed up ahead – abstract dollops of granite that make you wonder if Mother Nature was channelling her inner modernist when she sculpted them. There’s no mistaking the twin nodules of Haytor Rocks silhouetted on the skyline, but first up are the spectacularly riven outcrops of Hound Tor. Contrary to supposition, it’s not known for certain if Arthur Conan Doyle had this particular location in mind when he penned the 1901 novel which sees Holmes and Watson solve the mystery of a demonic dog, but it’s suitably sinister all the same. Especially on misty nights. Come bright skies, its fissured rock faces are crawling with climbers enjoying the griptastic qualities of quartz, feldspar and mica (the main mineral ingredients in granite). Though with judicious route-finding and careful footwork, there are various ways you can scramble to the top without having to rope up.
“…abstract
dollops of granite that make you wonder if Mother Nature was channeling her inner modernist
them.” when she sculpted
Among the bracken in the lee of Hound Tor there’s a cluster of low, rectangular walls daubed in moss. It’s all that survives of Hundatora – a deserted settlement that sprang up in the Middle Ages, when a burgeoning population and a prolonged spell of favourable weather lured intrepid farmers to the moor. Grazed by cattle since prehistoric times, the previously barren land around Hound Tor was put under the plough. Today you can step inside what’s left of the partitioned longhouses where people and animals lived under one thatched roof. Hundatora and its smallholders earned a mention in the Domesday Book, but the good times were shortlived and harvests failed as the climate deteriorated in the 1300s. The Black Death struck a double blow to isolated communities like this one. Pottery finds suggest it was finally abandoned a century later.
The Atlantic squalls that drove medieval farmers ▶
off the high ground still drench Dartmoor’s claggy heights today. It’s a case study much-loved by geography teachers – a textbook example of relief rainfall. Prevailing south-westerlies dump so much moisture here that Dartmoor casts a rain shadow over East Devon, with Princetown up at 1400 feet receiving twice as much rainfall annually than Teignmouth down on the coast. Even in July, it’s prudent to head out with Gore-Tex and gaiters stashed somewhere about your person.
All that water has to go somewhere and much of it collects in the pools and mires that form in the natural hollows high on the moor, where the peat acts like a giant sponge. Nature has a way of alerting us to these waterlogged pockets in summer. Just look for the swaying white seed heads of cotton grass, also known as pixie wool on Dartmoor. The store of freshwater slowly drains into streams like Becka Brook, which slooshes its way seaward below Hound Tor. Trailing it downriver back to Manaton, a change of scenery is in store.
Swapping open high ground for the woody and muffled world below, everything is different. Heather and bracken gives way to ivies, ferns and frizzier lichens. The ground underfoot is mulchy. The brook hisses excitedly now, as it plunges over Becky Falls (a pay-to-see attraction) to meet the River Bovey down in Houndtor Wood. Steering north to follow the river upstream, you feel like Professor Challenger (another Conan Doyle creation) taking his first steps into the Lost World. But despite the primeval vibes, Lustleigh Cleave isn’t home to dinosaurs, as far as we know. Like other such deep, rock-rimmed and boulder-choked valleys around the edges of Dartmoor, it is a temperate rainforest however – always humid and bristling with oak, birch and hazel. Part of the East Dartmoor National Nature Reserve, it’s prime territory for kingfishers, dippers and otters.
The narrow and rocky path upstream flirts with the murmuring river, arriving at a junction where there’s a nerve-jangling and age-old way across. ‘Use at your own risk’ warns a sign. Two slippery tree trunks span the surging water here, known as a clam bridge. It’s the primitive and paradoxical Trigger’s broom of bridges – one that’s been around for centuries, replaced many times over. Nowadays there’s a single handrail fixed to the trunks. There’s also a sensible modern footbridge alongside, just in case your balance beam skills aren’t what they were.
Emerging from the cleave through a bevy of Bronze Age hut circles, a diverging path swings left up to
Sharpitor where another point of interest is still marked on Ordnance Survey maps, though it hasn’t existed on the ground for 70 years. Once jutting proud of the canopy, the ‘Nut Crackers’ was a logan stone – a teetering boulder weighing several tons. So finely balanced was this quirk of erosion, it could be gently rocked, crushing anything caught underneath (so much for the proverbial sledgehammer). That was until 1860, when meddling navvies building a nearby railway tipped it off-kilter. Then in 1950, another act of vandalism sent it crashing into Lustleigh Cleave. Attempts by the Army to retrieve the Nut Cracker ended in disaster when it broke free and tumbled a further 100 feet, sending shards of rock flying as it disintegrated in a cloud of sulphurous smoke. It’s still down there somewhere.
Pushing onwards above the treetops you eventually come to Hunters Tor, home to some of Dartmoor’s 800 free-range ponies. From the outcrop below the summit, your eyeballs can feast on a quilted expanse of countryside billowing westward to Dartmoor’s far north. But before you get there, you’ll pass a ring of earthworks. Locals like to think this Iron Age hillfort saw a valiant last stand against marauding Romans. Evidently the legionaries weren’t impressed by the view, as they didn’t venture much further into the moor.
The last miles of the walk see you funnelled down an enchanting sunken path to the thatched farmhouse and clapper bridge at Foxworthy. Crossing the River Bovey for a second time, it’s a gentle sashay back up to Manaton.
Thoughts of a congenial country inn won’t be far from your mind by now, and there are plenty to choose from hereabouts. Plenty is a good word to describe Dartmoor. It may have a reputation as a bare and even bleak place, but it isn’t always so. Dartmoor is rich in history and lore, and where nature is allowed to thrive, it’s ruddy extraordinary. There’s beauty in abundance. Here’s to another 70 years of the national park.