Welcome to Legendary Dartmoor

This is the largest non-commercial Dartmoor website where you will find every aspect of Devon's jewel the Dartmoor National Park. Legendary Dartmoor includes information on the traditions, history, flora and fauna, legends, the supernatural, the Dartmoor arts, people past and present, places and folklore. I hope you will enjoy your visit to Legendary Dartmoor and come back again soon.

The intention of this web site is to provide an overview of the many aspects of Dartmoor in the hope that they will inspire people to visit the moor and discover the numerous, "Gems in a Granite Setting" for themselves. Some of the tales and stories within this site date way back in time whilst others literally happened yesterday but all go together to make an ever evolving heritage of Dartmoor. Albeit natural or supernatural, human or spiritual, everything will in some small way leave its mark, many of which now lie firmly in the written tomes and oral history of Dartmoor. So, I hope you enjoy your visit to Legendary Dartmoor and find something of interest but check back regularly as there are new pages being added all the time.

Over the past 12,000 years man has hunted, farmed, mined, quarried and lived on and around Dartmoor. From the early Mesolithic hunter gatherers to the modern day 'moorman', humans have left their marks on its landscape. Dartmoor has been described as the 'last wilderness' and sometimes when walking deep in that 'wilderness' it is not hard to believe that you are the first to set foot on its virgin soil. Don't even go there, just stop and have a good look and it's guaranteed that within eyesight will be the mark of someone being there before you. It may be a solitary standing stone on the horizon, built by the 'Men of Bronze' or it may be a small heap of stones left there by the old tinners, but somewhere there will be something. Every tor, mire, stream, gully, wood or valley will have a name, granted many of them won't appear on the modern map and lots have been forgotten in the mists of time but they will all have a name showing evidence of the presence of man. Therefore if man has been associated with the area for so long it is inevitable that there has been a wealth of tradition, archaeology, history, folklore and legend left for us to explore today.