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Medieval farmstead, Willings Walls Warren

Grid ref: SX 5820 6470

Main image: Photo: Chris Andrews, Wikimedia Commons

This scheduled monument combines evidence of activity spanning from the Bronze Age to the medieval period. The site centres on Willings Walls Reave, a substantial stone boundary that divides the moorland, likely constructed during the Bronze Age to define territories or pasture. Within and around this landscape lie four round cairns, a ring cairn, and pillow mounds, the latter indicating medieval rabbit warrens worked by farming communities.

A medieval farmstead sits within this layered archaeology, showing how later inhabitants adapted and used the ancient framework of the moor. The combination of reave, cairns and warren reveals how Dartmoor's communities returned to and reshaped the same land across centuries, each generation leaving its mark on the landscape.

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A Book of Dartmoor, page 85Plate from A Book of Dartmoor, page 85, 1900

“Ten thousand years hence it will be a great peat bog.”

Also on Our DartmoorHut circle enclosures at Petre's Pits Bottom — Two enclosed hut settlements on the Middle Brook valley slope, with later tinners' caches, one still keeping its beehive-shaped corbelled roof.

Dartmoor quiz
“The atmosphere of Dartmoor deserves particular notice ; it is at all times humid. The rain, which frequently falls, almost without intermission, for many weeks together, is generally small; and resembles more a Scotch mist than a shower.”

Who wrote this?

Anna Eliza Bray. From A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy, vol. 1 (1836).

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