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Eluvial tin streamworks, Whitchurch Common
Grid ref: SX 5354 7507
On walking routes: Abbot's Way
Whitchurch Common preserves multiple layers of Dartmoor's past. The eluvial tin streamworks are shallow channels where medieval miners diverted water to wash tin from the moorland gravels. This form of alluvial working was common across Dartmoor's tin districts when surface deposits were still accessible.
Beneath and around these workings lies a prehistoric coaxial field system, the regular grid of stone boundaries laid out in the Bronze Age to divide grazing and cultivation land. Other archaeological remains scattered across the common add to the sense of continuous occupation and use across millennia. The landscape here reads as palimpsest, each period leaving its mark on the moorland.
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