By: Blonde Two
Have a look at this little patch of OL28.
You are looking at perhaps two kilometres of Dartmoor; a well known section that is intersected by (very lovely) roads.
So a very small percent of Dartmoor’s total acreage, and nothing too wild; but look again, how many delights can you see in just this tiny section?
I counted four sets of hut circles, two cairns, one cist, one stone row, one clapper bridge, one field system, one coffin stone, two tors, three hills and one farmstead. And that is just the things that are marked on the map!
We Blondes have found most of the above before both in the daylight and at night; but for some reason, I have never checked out the farmstead before. Yesterday, my Blonde Business Missions complete, I was sitting in the sunshine on the top of Sharp Tor when my landscape admirations caused me to notice a very distinct shape of rocks. Being Blonde, I had my map with me and did a quick bit of aligning (easy when you can see a reservoir, two other tors and a road!) I think it was the fact that the rock-shaping was marked as ‘farmstead’ and not ‘hut circle’ that made me want to go and investigate.
Can you see it in the middle of this picture? You will notice that it is currently surrounded by bracken, you will not notice (because of the bracken) that it is only fifty metres away from the road.
I had to do a little bit of bracken fighting to get there (I have a feeling there was a path that I wasn’t on; but it was well worth it. It is a very solid-feeling structure made of large rocks, that you could imagine as an animal pound; smaller but similar to the one at Dunnabridge. If you look back at the map photo, you will see it just marked as a little circle to the right of the Yar Tor car park.
A little Dartmoor exploration and a little Dartmoor find; but fascinating and satisfying nonetheless. That’s what makes Dartmoor so endlessly entertaining, even Blondes won’t ever run out of things to find!
I walked over Bel Tor to the east of your Sharp Tor (one of five Sharp Tors on Dartmoor) on my Two Moors Way. I could see something spiky sticking up in a notch on the ridge of Sharp Tor so took a long zoom photo to discover that it was a windswept tree.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/40tf7femj3z8687/P1000723%20copy.JPG?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/645fzqe714wuvkl/P1000724%20copy.JPG?dl=0
It could be interesting to do a bit of responsible metal detecting amongst those ruins.
Not sure there is such a thing as ‘responsible’ metal detecting on Dartmoor – you would have to ask the National Park Authority about that. The tree is lovely though, I had my cup of tea looking at it.
That’s good – there ought to be something spiky on a Sharp Tor.
Dear Blondes, please enlighten me. How is a stone row marked on a map? I couldn’t find it, but that may be because I didn’t know what I was looking for. I did spot a nice cross – like visiting those. And is the dotted line with the coffin stone on it actually a coffin road?
Look at the top of the bit of map. To the left of ‘Yar’, there is a dotted line. It does say ‘Stone Row’ just off the picture. It is a tiny one that has only recently been cleared by the Dartmoor Preservation Society. The coffin stone is on an old coffin carrying route, but the dotted line just parks a path.
Yes, I meant that it would obviously have to be academically organised archaeology, but as I think about it now I reckon it would be unacceptable desecration.
Looks like a great spot. Well found!
Blonde thank you’s!