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Prehistoric Settlements

Partially enclosed hut circle settlement near The Grey Wethers

Grid ref: SX 6391 8249

Main image: Photo: jeff collins, Wikimedia Commons

This scheduled monument consists of a cluster of hut circles arranged within and around a partially enclosed stone boundary. The settlement likely dates to the Bronze Age, when communities occupied the higher moorland of Dartmoor, living from farming and pastoralism. The hut circles themselves appear as circular depressions and stone foundations in the turf, the remains of round houses with stone or timber frameworks.

Today the site sits in open moorland south of the Grey Wethers stone circles, a landscape that has changed little in character since these dwellings were occupied. Visitors walking the moor will find the settlement as earthwork features, subtle but readable to those who know what to look for. The partial enclosure suggests some organization of the settlement space, though time and weathering have eroded much of the original stonework.

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A Hundred Years on Dartmoor, page 15Plate from A Hundred Years on Dartmoor, page 15, 1901

“Swelling and sinking solemnly along the sky, Dartmoor surrounded Newtake.”

Also on Our DartmoorOkehampton parish boundary stones at Cullever Steps — Two OPB (Okehampton Parish Bounds) stones at Cullever Steps, the larger a 19th-century replacement for the smaller: Dartefacts BS No.14 and BS No.15.

Dartmoor quiz
“There was nobody to see him; all the brown moor was void with loneliness and lassitude; not a shadow, except his own, moved faster than the sun directed it.”

Who wrote this?

R. D. Blackmore. From Christowell (1882).

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