Brent Moor House

• Parish: South Brent
• Grid reference: SX 68290 63570
• Record: Devon HER MDV67559
• Demolished: 1968
• Near: Shipley Bridge, about 600 m south

Brent Moor House began as a small 17th-century farmstead and was rebuilt as a large house. Francis Meynell, a former naval officer and artist, bought it and an estate of about 3,000 acres in 1855. The Meynells left after the deaths of Mary and Geoffrey, and a memorial to Mary Meynell stands beside the track; sources disagree on the dates. C. A. Mohun-Harris lived here in the 1880s and 1890s and had the Hunter's Stone put up, and it later became the Dartmoor Hunt master's lodge.

From 1941 to 1944 it was a home for deaf children evacuated from Plymouth, and then a youth hostel until 1955. The Royal Marines blew it up in 1968. Crossing's Gems in a Granite Setting (1905, p. 130) mentions its grounds, enclosed more than fifty years before, with trees along the river banks, and his 1914 guide notes the house and cottages close to the river.

It is not the Brent Moor House Cist, a prehistoric site nearby.

Sources: Devon HER MDV67559; Lost Heritage, Brentmoor House; W. Crossing, Gems in a Granite Setting (1905) p. 130 and Guide to Dartmoor (1914) vol. 1 p. 218; Weir, Dartmoor and Exmoor p. 46; Geograph.