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Grid ref: SX 6427 6296
On walking routes: Two Moors Way
Main image: Photo: Derek Harper, Wikimedia Commons
This scheduled monument preserves the remains of a prehistoric settlement on the open moorland of the Erme Valley. The site comprises several stone huts, likely dating to the Bronze Age, arranged across unenclosed land in a pattern typical of Dartmoor's early agricultural communities. These were practical dwellings built to exploit the high moor for grazing and seasonal movement.
Today the hut circles are visible as low stone rings set into the heather and grass, with traces of their walls and hearths still discernible to those who know what to look for. The site sits within the wider landscape of prehistoric Dartmoor, among other settlements and field systems that speak to a time when the moor was more densely inhabited and worked than in later periods.
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Plate from A Hundred Years on Dartmoor, page 45, 1901“And often have I seen the moor so chequered and broken with light and shade, that it required no stretch of the imagination to convert many a weather-beaten tor into the towers and ruined walls of a feudal castle. Nay, even human forms, gigantic in their dimensions, sometimes seemed to start wildly ...”
Also on Our DartmoorA Sunday in Dartmoor — A priest's account of being sent to take Sunday service at Dartmoor Prison, Princetown. A magazine essay, not a book.
“The only thing that brought us home on long summer evenings was the ring of a handbell by Mum standing at the field gate calling us in for supper.”
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