Childe's Tomb

• Period: Medieval
• Grid reference: SX 6257 7029 (approximate, from the listing's coordinates)

The written trail behind this monument runs through four generations of Dartmoor writers who never quite agreed on it. Tristram Risdon's Survey of Devon (c.1632) already tells the horse story, writing that Childe "was enforced to kill his horse, and embowelled him, to creep into his belly to get heat." Anna Eliza Bray (1836) and Sabine Baring-Gould (1900) each printed a different version of the rhyme said to explain Childe's bequest of his land to whichever abbey buried him. By 1902 William Crossing was disputing Baring-Gould in print, questioning whether the surviving kistvaen here is really Childe's grave at all. Read the fuller legend of Childe the Hunter.