Rundle Stone

• Grid reference: SX 5755 7497 (the road junction; the exact spot of the pillar is not recorded)
• Parishes: Walkhampton and Dartmoor Forest
• Pillar: about 7 ft tall, marked with an R; gone by 1881
• Record: Devon HER MDV5023 (the nearby turnpike stone)

The Rundle Stone was a granite pillar on the line of the Forest boundary near the Tavistock road, and the spot took its name from it. Dartmoor Explorations gives it as about 7 feet tall and 4 feet round, reportedly cut with an R. It is not named as a bondmark in any of the boundary surveys; Hansford Worth suggested it was the one artificial mark among natural ones. In 1702 it was used as a point between North Hessary Tor and Great Mis Tor, which bent the Forest boundary away from the straight line of 1608 until the error was put right in 1867.

Crossing wrote that the stone was broken up when a wall was built nearby, and it is absent from an 1881 Ordnance Survey sketch. Only the name survives, on the hamlet, the junction and Rundlestone Tor. A Tavistock Turnpike Trust stone beside the road, inscribed Walkhampton and Lidford but now illegible, is thought to stand on or near the site.

Crossing (Guide to Dartmoor, 1914, vol. 1, p. 49) tells of a Princetown prison schoolmaster who died in the snow near a wall by the first houses here, on his way home from Tavistock. The pictures show the junction and the stones beside the road, not the pillar itself.

Sources: W. Crossing, Guide to Dartmoor (1914) vol. 1 pp. 49 and 59; Dartmoor Explorations, Erroneous Dartmoor Forest boundary change at Rundlestone; Dartefacts, Tavistock Turnpike Trust stone; Worth, On Dartmoor Place-Names.