Beating the Bounds

Each parish used to walk its boundary at regular intervals, a ceremony called Beating the Bounds. The idea was that if as many parishioners as possible walked the boundary, there would always be a living record of where it ran if a land dispute arose. On the moor it also asserted the parish's grazing rights, which meant people's livelihoods.

Dartmoor parishes historically did it every seven years, usually in Rogation Week, though some preferred Rogation-tide, once the ancient feast of Terminus, the god of boundaries. Okehampton kept a different date: Ascension Day, known there as Spurling Day.

Many moorland parishes let the custom lapse between the middle of the 19th century and the early 20th. Ashburton's revival is an example. A paper of 1613 gave an account of the last beating of the bounds there, and in 1835 it was realised that the custom had not been carried out for 282 years. It was revived and held on 22 October 1895.