Arms Tor hut circle settlement and boundary stone

Historic England's scheduling record (list entry 1008638) describes fifteen stone hut circles, a length of enclosure wall, a parish boundary stone and stone-splitting pits, the largest part of a settlement on the west-facing slope of Arms Tor, overlooking the valley of the River Lyd. The six northern huts are joined by a curved enclosure wall 1.7 metres wide and 0.4 metres high, which defines the northern and western sides of an enclosure. The south and east sides were never finished or survive as buried features. The wall is later than the huts it links, which is useful evidence of how the settlement developed. It lies across the parishes of LCPs of Bridestowe and Sourton and Lydford, about 0.8 km north-west of Brat Tor.

The huts are stone and earth banks around circular inner areas 4.2 to 6.3 metres across, averaging 5.61 metres, with walls 0.3 to 1.35 metres high, averaging 0.7 metres. Six are linked to the enclosure wall, one has a doorway you can see, two have more than one room and one has a partition.

Two later features are included. One is a roughly dressed granite pillar, 1.5 metres high, 0.6 metres wide and 0.4 metres thick, which marks the boundary between the commons of Bridestowe and Sourton and the parish of Lydford. The other is a large number of stone-splitting pits, averaging 2.5 metres across and 0.4 metres deep, made when people searched for and quarried a little surface stone.

Sources: Historic England list entry 1008638, which cites Butler, Dartmoor Atlas of Antiquities (1991), pages 151 and 224, Gibson, Single Monument Class Description: Stone Hut Circles (1988), the Devon County Sites and Monuments Register (SX58NW9) and fieldwork for the Monuments Protection Programme by S. Gerrard.

• Period: Bronze Age
• Status: Scheduled monument (Historic England list entry 1008638)
• Grid reference: SX 5359 8629 (approximate, from the listing's coordinates)

Historic England listed designation: Hut circles and a length of enclosure wall, forming part of a stone hut circle settlement 600m east of Nodden Gate