Challacombe

Challacombe is a farm and a few buildings in a shallow valley between Postbridge and Widecombe, with Challacombe Down on one side and Hamel Down on the other. It is a remote spot even by Dartmoor standards, and it is best known not for the settlement but for what is written into the ground around it.

On the slope beside the farm lie some of the clearest medieval strip lynchets in the south west, the long terraces of a field system worked when this valley supported a community, abandoned centuries ago and preserved because nothing has ploughed them since. Close by are the tin workings of the Vitifer and Birch Tor mines, the warren where rabbits were farmed commercially, and, over the shoulder of Hamel Down, Grimspound: the Bronze Age enclosure whose wall and hut circles are the most visited prehistoric site on Dartmoor. Few square miles anywhere hold so many layers of the moor's history.