Nun's Cross Farm

• Lease: John Hooper, 31 years from the Duchy, 25 March 1870, rent 2 pounds 10 shillings
• First cottage: About 1871 (census April 1871 shows a temporary hut)
• Present house: Two storey, three bedroom, permission 1901 (Edward Worth)
• Use now: School bunkhouse and base
• Next to: Nun's Cross (listing 2808)

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.

This is a location on Dartmoor that has a namesake. Read more about this: Dartmoor Places With the Same Name