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Princetown, Devon
Grid ref: SX 6058 6983 Find this on the Map Reference Finder
On walking routes: Abbot's Way
Nun's Cross Farm stands on the southern moor beside Nun's Cross, a few miles south of Princetown. The Duchy of Cornwall gave John Hooper a 31 year lease here on 25 March 1870, and he had to build a stone cottage with a slate roof within two years. In April 1871 the family were still in a temporary shelter, and the first cottage was probably finished by the end of that year.
That first house is not the one that stands today. By 1898 Hooper's son-in-law, Edward Worth, had turned it into a cattle shed, and in 1901 he was given permission to build a two storey, three bedroom farmhouse, which is today's building. The Worth and Coaker families farmed it, and in the late 1930s the Phillips family were the last recorded farmers. The old cottage was ruined and unroofed by the 1960s.
After some restoration a school runs the house as a bunkhouse, mainly for school parties, Duke of Edinburgh groups and Ten Tors teams. Some writers date the farmhouse to 1870; that is the lease and the first cottage, not the present house. The farm is also put forward as a candidate for Merripit House in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
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Plate from Dartmoor Illustrated, page 90, 1900“A gloom, too, spread itself with great rapidity over the face of nature, the clouds rolling up and speedily obscuring the sun.”
Also on Our DartmoorStannon Tor — A quiet tor with a sheepfold and scattered granite on its slopes, offering good views to the south and west.
“The simple and time-worn memorials of unchronicled ages, rear their hoary forms amidst the sombre solitudes of the moor.”
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