Branscombe's Loaf

Branscombe's Loaf and Cheese are granite outcrops on Corn Ridge (SX 5531 8913, 538 m), in the parishes of Bridestowe and Sourton on the north-west side of Dartmoor.

The story is about Walter Bronescombe, Bishop of Exeter from 1258 to 1280. Tired and hungry on the ridge, he is offered bread and cheese by a stranger. His chaplain notices a cloven hoof under the stranger's coat. In Legendary Dartmoor's telling a servant knocks the food out of the bishop's hands and the stranger vanishes, leaving a smell of sulphur. In the version on Tors of Dartmoor the bishop makes the sign of the cross and the stranger disappears. Either way the loaf and the cheese are the two rocks.

The earliest source found is Sylvia Sayer's The Outline of Dartmoor's Story (1951). Eric Hemery repeated it in High Dartmoor (1983), and Dartmoor Magazine covered it in 2022 (issue 147). Legendary Dartmoor says the story cannot be dated. Why the bishop was chosen is not known. One suggestion is that it grew up to answer charges of underhand dealing against him, but that is a guess.

A similar tale is told at Dawlish, on the Devon coast, well away from Dartmoor. In the Parson and Clerk legend a Bishop of Exeter falls ill at Dawlish, and an ambitious priest and his clerk lose their way on Haldon moor in a storm. The priest says he would rather have the devil himself as a guide, a horseman appears and leads them to a lit house, and the news comes that the bishop has died. The horseman is the devil, and the two men are turned to stone and stand as the Parson and Clerk rocks on the coast. The details differ, but both tales have a bishop of Exeter, the devil in disguise, an offer of hospitality, and stone. Wikipedia gives 1848 as the earliest written version of the Dawlish story and does not name the bishop in any telling.