Two Bridges

Two Bridges is barely a hamlet, but it is one of the best known names on Dartmoor because of where it sits. Here the road across the moor from Tavistock meets the road from Moretonhampstead, and both cross the West Dart, giving the place its name: an old clapper crossing beside the later road bridge. There has been an inn here since the late eighteenth century, when Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt was opening up the central moor, and the hotel remains a landmark for travellers in a landscape with very few of them.

The hamlet is the usual way in to Wistman's Wood, which lies a mile or so up the West Dart and is one of the strangest places in England: a remnant of high altitude oak woodland, the trees stunted and twisted and every branch thick with moss and lichen, growing out of a chaos of granite boulders. Crockern Tor stands close by, the open air meeting place where the Stannary Parliament of Devon's tin miners gathered from the fourteenth century. Few places pack so much into so little.