Challacombe Down strip fields and tin mills

Historic England's scheduling record (list entry 1021393) describes a medieval field system, several tinworks, part of a prehistoric hut circle settlement, a cairn and a length of reave on Challacombe Down. The deserted medieval settlement at Challacombe lies just south-east and has its own scheduling. It lies in the parish of Manaton, about 1.5 km south of Birch Tor.

The fields are narrow rectangles bounded by substantial stone and earth banks, mostly parallel with the contours but across them towards the south and north-west edges, the steeper ones held by the biggest banks, the lynchets. Farmers from the nearby hamlet of Challacombe built them in the medieval period, each field was farmed separately, and individual farmers held fields throughout the area. Ridge and furrow shows many were ploughed, but in others so much surface stone suggests they were only ever grazed.

There is a lot of tinworking. One of the earliest is a small area of streamwork on the lower west slopes. The most dramatic are the rock-cut openworks that in places cut through the field system, the largest called Scudley Beam, up to 75 metres wide and 15 metres deep, with the prospecting pits, leats and reservoirs nearby that led to finding the lodes. The ore was crushed at two stamping mills inside the monument. The first stands below Scudley Beam as stone-faced pits, walls and platforms, and the second, at SX 69197913, is a partly stone-faced rectangular hollow with a wheelpit at its south-west end. The last group of tin remains includes three circular buddles and a wheelpit at SX 68877911, a dressing floor built about 1927 for the Golden Dagger Mine, which a photograph of that time shows in its original layout.

The prehistoric remains are a settlement in the north-west corner, two agglomerated enclosures with three huts and a single enclosure with one hut, a length of the Hameldown North Reave that climbs the east side of Challacombe Down to join the Headland Warren boundary wall at SX 69058039, and a cairn at SX 69107940, a flat-topped mound 12 metres across and up to 0.5 metres high. Modern fences are excluded, though the ground beneath them is included.

Sources: Historic England list entry 1021393, which cites the Duchy Farms Survey of Challacombe at 1:10,000 (1990) and Greeves, Tin Mines and Miners of Dartmoor (1986).

• Period: Medieval
• Status: Scheduled monument (Historic England list entry 1021393)
• Grid reference: SX 6896 7984 (approximate, from the listing's coordinates)