Sunday Stroll on Dartmoor

We had a change of scenery and moor for our last Sunday stroll. We took advantage of already being in the Plymouth area and headed for Norsworthy Bridge, at the top of Burrator, and walked from there onto Dartmoor. The weather was just the job - sunny, dry and clear. A walk with tors, open moor, archaeology, industrial archaeology and some social history at the end. All that and a couple of homemade pasties (mini-size, of course).

We clocked just under 3.5 miles for this one. Short, perhaps, but with enough uphill to make us feel that we'd had some exercise. We started and ended in the car park at Norsworthy Bridge. We headed off to Down Tor, took in the nearby stone row, then across to Combshead Tor, down into the valley via Cuckoo Rock and back to the start along the old farm track.

Many tree around here are bedecked with the lichen Old Man's Beard or Usnea Florida/Floridiana. A testament to the unpolluted air in these parts. It looks very similar to the epiphytic flowering plant known as Spanish Moss (which is neither a moss nor a lichen!)

On the way up to Down Tor and looking back towards Burrator. Autumn is definitely with us with leaves and bracken turning brown.

Down Tor, our first target.

Very close to Down Tor is this Bronze Age complex of stone row, cairn circle and standing stone. It is also known as Hingston Down stone row. Down is a mutation of the old word for hill 'dun'. Hingston might be derived from a name - Hengest has been suggested. Put them together and you get 'Hengest's Hill'. Does this suggest who was buried here or hereabouts? Who knows but it's always interesting to speculate.

The stone row is about 300 metres long and has 174 stones which vary in height from 0.2 to 1 metre. Something like this, if  it was built to commemorate a person, says something about the status of the person. There is some evidence for alignment of the sun at certain times of the year.

Looking down from Combshead Tor in a south westerly direction. On the horizon, the silver strip is the sea. The landscape has been shaped by humans for millennia and this view contains some typical elements - Bronze Age hut circles and cairns, signs of tin mining stretching back to mediaeval times and farming artifacts spanning centuries.

There are many abandoned farms on Dartmoor and in this valley, Dean Coombe, we came across two. The first one is Coombe Head farm. It was not abandoned as such but bought out when Burrator reservoir was built in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Although it is about 1 mile from the actual reservoir, it lies within its water catchment area and all agricultural activity was prohibited because of possible pollution.

The remains of mushroom stones at Coombe Head Farm. The stones originally had flat tops and supported a barn or grainstore. The overhang of the flat tops prevented grain eating rodents getting at the precious food.

We came from the right, headed off to the left and left the middle direction for another day. Actually, we have walked that way several times: the track leads up to Sheepstor via quite a slog. Not pleasant in the pouring rain, as it was when we last did it.

Just a dead tree glistening in the afternoon sun.

This chunk of granite has always intrigued me. Look closely at the edges of the flat top and you'll see the drill marks used for splitting a piece off the top. The explanation I favour for this is that a gate post was split off from the top of the original boulder. Whatever came off would have been the result of a lot of hard work. Drilling granite manually does not come easy.

A rather fine old granite barn at Middleworth Farm.

I knew what this was as soon as I saw it. People lighting campfires in and around the moor seems to be a particular problem this year and this was obviously an attempt to reseed one such spot.

And this was confirmed by this notice lying some way away. I've got no problems with people lighting well controlled fires in appropriate areas but I do have big problems with those who do it indiscriminately and without any regard to the surroundings. Unfortunately the Covid crisis seems to have brought out the worse in a lot of people. Oh dear, I do sound like a grumpy old man. But, then, I am.