Sheepstor

Sheepstor is a hamlet of a few houses and a church tucked beneath the tor that gives it its name, on the edge of Burrator Reservoir. The church of St Leonard is small and very old, and its churchyard holds a surprise: the graves of the White Rajahs of Sarawak. James Brooke, the Englishman who became ruler of Sarawak in Borneo in the nineteenth century, retired to Devon and was buried here in 1868, and members of his family lie beside him, an unlikely connection between a Dartmoor hamlet and a kingdom on the other side of the world.

The tor above the village is a fine climb with a great view over the reservoir and out towards Plymouth Sound, and the ground around it holds the cave known as the Pixies' House, marked on the old maps and long attached to stories of hiding and of the little people. Burrator itself, completed in 1898 to supply Plymouth with water, drowned the valley below the village, and the farms that stood there can still be found on the Ordnance Survey maps made before the dam was built.