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Antiquities

Enclosures and hut circles at Petre's Pits Bottom

Devon

Petre's Pits Bottom holds the remains of a Bronze Age community, marked by hut circles and associated field enclosures scattered across the moorland. The site sits in a sheltered valley, where Bronze Age people built round stone houses and worked the land around them. What you see today are the low stone foundations and walls that once formed the outer edges of these dwellings and the boundaries of their small fields and plots.

The landscape here tells a story of upland farming in prehistory, when Dartmoor was more actively settled than it would be in later periods. Walking across Petre's Pits Bottom, you can read the pattern of human activity: the circular shapes of hut foundations, the cairns and field walls that still guide the eye across the moorland. This is a working archaeological site within a living landscape, protected as a Scheduled Monument.

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Photo: Guy Wareham (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

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