Gutter Tor Cross (unfinished, near the longhouse)

• Grid reference: SX 57886 66773 (walker's log; another gives SX 57883 66769)
• Recorded: December 2009
• Length: About 1.75 m above ground, shaft just under 0.5 m wide
• Nearby: Ruined medieval longhouse and farmstead

A student team from the Plymouth archaeology course, led by Win Scutt and Ross Dean, recorded this granite slab in December 2009 while surveying the ruined medieval settlement on the slopes of Gutter Tor. They first took it for a gatepost. It has three arms and a long incised channel down the shaft, and was judged probably unfinished. It lies a few metres from the path climbing to the tor, south west of the medieval longhouse and close to an unfinished apple crusher.

Press coverage has put it in the thirteenth century, but no basis for that date is given, so it is left open here. The settlement was recorded as Gotetorre in the assize rolls of 1281 and is one of around a dozen farmsteads within field systems either side of the River Plym. A suggestion that the cross was a monastic waymarker or a boundary marker is speculation by one page's author and is not established.

Sources: Dartmoor Explorations, Gutter Tor longhouse and farmstead | Dartmoor CAM, Gutter Tor walk | Legendary Dartmoor, Gutter Tor | Dartmoor Crosses, the same cross with photographs.