Hound Tor Deserted Medieval Village

• Period: 13th to 14th century
• Grid reference: SX 7463 7877
• Excavated: 1961 to 1975

The deserted village below Hound Tor, near Manaton, is a group of medieval farm buildings on land that was first farmed in the Bronze Age. The buildings date from the 13th century: four Dartmoor longhouses, several smaller houses and barns, and three grain barns that were fitted with corn dryers, which suggests the climate was worsening. The place is named Hundatorra in Domesday, where it belonged to Tavistock Abbey.

Pollen evidence says farming had stopped by about 1350, although pottery suggests some occupation into the late 14th or early 15th century. The site was excavated between 1961 and 1975. Finds were slight: one coin of Henry III and broken pottery from Crockerton in Wiltshire. The acid soil may have destroyed much of the rest.

Hound Tor itself is a heavily weathered granite outcrop of 414 m. Sabine Baring-Gould thought the name came from the summit blocks, which look like hounds' heads over the rocks. The tor is often linked to Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. This is the Hound Tor most visitors mean. The other one is a different tor on the high moor above Throwleigh: see Hound Tor, Throwleigh.

The excavation behind what you see here was unfinished business for years. E. Marie Minter dug the site between 1961 and 1975 but died before writing up the results. Guy Beresford completed her work and published the definitive report, in Medieval Archaeology, Vol. 23 (1979), pp.98-158, eighteen years after Minter's dig began.