Standon Down hut circle settlement

Historic England's scheduling record (list entry 1008244) describes sixty-seven stone hut circles, a post-medieval shelter, a shieling of medieval or post-medieval date and at least twenty fields on a gentle west-facing slope above the valley of the River Tavy. Together they are most of the large unenclosed hut circle settlement north of Standon Down. It lies in the parish of Peter Tavy, about 0.5 km east of Nat Tor.

Fifty-six of the huts are attached to boundary walls. Sixty-six are circular, with inner diameters from 1.8 to 8.8 metres and an average of 4.19 metres, and one is oval, 3.2 metres by 2 metres. The walls average 0.73 metres high. At least one hut contains a hearth, two have porches, one has an inner partition wall and two have benches. The twenty or so irregular fields mostly butt against the huts, which suggests they were added after the settlement was founded.

A shepherd's shelter of coursed drystone, 1.8 metres by 1.4 metres inside, is built into one of the older huts and has its doorway on the south. The shieling, a rectangular one-room building 6 metres by 4.4 metres with walls 1.3 metres wide and up to 0.6 metres high, stands on the southern edge of the settlement and may have been built with stone taken from a hut circle beneath it.

In July 1901 the Dartmoor Exploration Committee partly excavated forty-three of the huts and found a lot of charcoal, cooking stones, pottery and flint.

Sources: Historic England list entry 1008244, which cites Fox, South West England (1964), Baring-Gould, Eighth Report of the Dartmoor Exploration Committee (Devonshire Association Transactions, vol 34, 1902), Radford, 'Prehistoric Settlements on Dartmoor and the Cornish Moors' (Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 18, 1952), Schofield, MPP Single Monument Class Descriptions: Shielings (1989), and Gibson, Single Monument Class Description: Stone Hut Circles (1987).

• Period: Bronze Age
• Status: Scheduled monument (Historic England list entry 1008244)
• Grid reference: SX 5503 8248 (approximate, from the listing's coordinates)