Cross Dyke reave

Cross Dyke reave is a low stone bank, part of the extensive system of field boundaries and livestock barriers that were built across Dartmoor during the Bronze Age. These reaves, as they are known locally, divided the landscape into parcels and controlled the movement of animals across the open moorland. The boundary survives today as a modest but persistent feature in the turf, legible to those walking the moor and willing to read its form.

Standing on the reave, you are in direct contact with Bronze Age land use and settlement patterns. The reave sits within a wider network of similar boundaries that make Dartmoor one of the most extensively organised prehistoric landscapes in Britain. To walk here is to move through a palimpsest of land division that has shaped the moor for over three thousand years.