The cross head is built into an ivy-capped field wall to the right of the cattle grid at the entrance to Gisperdown Farm, up a steep narrow lane from Harbourneford. Neither Crossing nor Starkey mentions it, and the first description is in Bill Harrison's Dartmoor Stone Crosses of 2001. Around 1947 men repairing a wall and bank at the farm found the head, part of a shaft with one arm still on it and the other arm detached. They kept the main part but used the broken arm in the wall backfill, and the farmer, interested in Dartmoor heritage, had the wall pulled down again, but the arm was not found.
Harrison records that the farmer thought it might be the lost fourth Brent Moor boundary cross, the others being Hobajohn's, Petre's and Huntingdon, and that the shaft may have been used by tinners in a shelter at Wider Brook Clitters. That is a possibility, not a proof. The farm is private land and the cross is visible from the lane.
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View from Leeden Tor. Photograph by Glavind Strachan Photography
“Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire, down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in, this cold and cruel-hearted man is forever buried.”
Also on Our DartmoorRound cairns around Down Tor — Six Bronze Age cairns in four scheduled monuments around Down Tor, four of them with burial boxes (cists), plus a cairn built against a rock outcrop.
Dartmoor quizPhotograph by Glavind Strachan Photography
Which Dartmoor tor is on the left hand side of this photo?
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View from Leeden Tor. Photograph by Glavind Strachan Photography