The Legend of Bowerman's Nose

The popular version goes like this: a man named Bowerman was out hunting on a Sunday when a white doe appeared. He chased it across the moor, ignoring warnings that he was breaking the Sabbath. As punishment, he was petrified where he stood, becoming the stack of granite that now bears his name. It is the kind of cautionary tale that sits comfortably in the Dartmoor folklore canon: transgression, the wild, and geological oddity all rolled into one.

As for where this story came from, that is where things get hazier. The written sources do not go back very far, and they do not entirely agree on the details. I have worked through what I could find, and there is more to say about it than fits here; I have written a longer piece on Bowerman's Nose that goes into the provenance question properly. The short version: the tale is recorded in modern folklore collections, but tracing it back to a genuine older tradition is harder than the internet usually admits. Whether it is as old as the granite itself, or a Victorian invention, or something that mutated in between, remains pleasantly unclear.