This scheduled monument preserves a coaxial field system on the western side of the North Teign valley, one of Dartmoor's most extensive prehistoric land divisions. The geometric layout of stone walls and banks, organised in parallel lines across the high moor, reflects Bronze Age or Iron Age farming practice. Later medieval and post-medieval activity has left additional traces across the same landscape, showing how these upland areas continued to be worked and occupied across centuries.
Walking across Shovel Down, Stonetor Hill and Long Ridge, visitors encounter the actual bones of Dartmoor's past. The field walls are often slight but persistent, visible as lines of stones or vegetation change running across the rough moorland. This is landscape archaeology on a large scale, where the patterns themselves tell the story of how people organised their land and labour on high, exposed ground.
Dartefacts is a database of Dartmoor sites with far more close-up detail than we can show here, and it is the best place to go deeper. Dartefacts is free to use, and nobody has to pay to look things up. If you want more, a yearly subscription adds 10-figure grid references, map zoom down to 1:25,000 and lists to tick off the places you have visited, and it helps keep the site going. We would encourage you to subscribe.
Our Dartmoor doesn't track you and runs no adverts. We use one cookie to make the
site work, and some pages load videos, maps or optional social media panels from other sites, the panels only if you choose to show them.
