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Antiquities

Hele Cross: a wayside cross 700m south east of Wormhill

Devon

Hele Cross is a wayside cross of medieval date, one of many that once guided travellers, pilgrims and traders across Dartmoor's high open ground. These crosses marked routes between settlements, monastic lands and market towns, and served as meeting points and landmarks in a landscape without roads or signposts. The cross stands isolated in moorland terrain south east of Wormhill, exposed to the weather and the long views that characterize this part of Dartmoor.

Today the cross remains a scheduled monument, a physical link to centuries of movement across the moor. Visitors find it on open ground where the horizons stretch wide, a reminder of how people navigated and used this landscape long before modern tracks and maps. The moorland around it, unchanged in character, offers the same sense of space and distance that travellers would have known.

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Photo: Nilfanion (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

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