Haytor Vale

Haytor Vale is a small village tucked into the valley below Haytor itself, and unlike most Dartmoor settlements it was not slowly grown but deliberately built, put up in the nineteenth century to house the men who worked the granite quarries on the moor above. The Rock Inn served them and serves visitors now, and the village has a neat, planned feel that sets it apart from the older hamlets nearby.

The quarries above are the reason the village exists, and they are worth the walk: flooded workings, cut faces and abandoned blocks, and above all the Haytor Granite Tramway, whose rails were cut from granite itself rather than laid in iron, and which carried stone down off the moor towards the canal and on to London. Haytor Rocks stand over everything, the most climbed and most photographed tor on Dartmoor, with a view that on a clear day reaches the sea.