Tag Archives: Dartmoor

“Sunshine played over the blue hazes and touched the grey summit of Shepherd’s Cross, where the ancient stone stood erect and solitary on the heath. It reared not far distant from rough, broken ground, where Tudor miners have streamed the hillside for tin in Elizabethan days. The relic glimmered with …

Just over 1.8 kilometres south-south-west of Moretonhampstead along a road known as Pound Street is a small crossroads known as Bovey Cross. This narrow road takes its name from the old North Bovey livestock pound some 640 metres further down the road. Besides the crossroads sits an ancient wayside cross, …

Back in the Dark Ages nobody was safe from the marauding bands of Vikings that plundered the coasts. The sleek, low draughted boats could take them up many of the English rivers and it was only a matter of luck if they were looking to trade or seeking to plunder. …

This is a bit like a ‘buy one, get one free’ offer because when you visit Hawson Cross you get the Stumpy Oak for nothing. This is simply because both stand within a few feet of each other on a small island of grass at a road junction. Before 1887, …

Walk a short way up the tiny Grims Lake stream and you will arrive at a large area enclosed by a circular wall which immediately suggests a settlement of sorts. This is ‘Grimspound’, a very evocative name if ever there was one but unfortunately the place-name is only a few …

Walk up the valley of the Langcombe and you will eventually come to a low, irregular circle of stones inside which sits a kistvaen. This is the sinister sounding ‘Grim’s Grave’ whose name shadows its origins. If you read the early writers such as Page you will be led to …

“Here stood Bair Down Man, a lofty menhir that wrote humanity upon the wilderness… those uplifted fragments of unwrought rock that stood where the bygone people worshipped their spirits or buried their dead—were but scratches on earth’s face to tell that here the ” old men ” had intercourse with …

Another fire rose furious up; behind Another and another: all the hills Each beyond each held up its crest of flame. Along the heavens the bright crimson hue Widening and deepening travels on; the range O’erleaps black Tamar, by whose ebon tide Cornwall is bounded; and on to Haytor rock …