Dartmoor Intro. & Bovey Tracey

Dartmoor, famous for its wild ponies, grim early 19 th cent prison and most especially its rugged desolate beauty is southern England's last great wilderness. This is principally an area to experience the outdoors, although scenic drives along unfenced roads can be highly exhilarating. Throughout the moor, a national park since 1951, weathered rock outcrops known as tors, punctuate the wind blown wastes and often provide exciting viewpoints. Formed of hardened magma, the tors have surprising individuality shaped as they are by erosion - some appear as block-like chunks, others as pinnacles, pillars and buttresses. Two summits exceed 2000ft (High Willhays at 2039ft & Yes Tor at 2029ft) while several others reach 1900ft. Although evidence of prehistoric occupation is scattered everywhere, the moor today remains the largest unpeopled area in the south of England. A bleak expanse, much of it bogland, that retains a distinctive, eerie beauty of its own it is occasionally intruded upon by conventional, sleepy, picturesque thatched villages such as Widdecombe or Buckland.

 

The national park headquarters, and a visitor centre, are located at Bovey Tracey, a pleasant small market town regarding itself as the gateway to Dartmoor - this because of its situation at the busy south-eastern corner of the moor. The town offers woodland and riverside walks in the nearby Parke Estate, also home to the Rare Breeds Farm. The name Bovey refers to the local river and the Tracey to the de Tracey family who owned land nearby. Its most infamous member, William de Tracey, was one of the conspiratorial knights who slaughtered Thomas a Becket at Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. It is said that he rebuilt the town's church as penance for his crime, rededicating it to include the name St Thomas. The church is very beautiful with a fine rood screen, carved pulpit and Jacobean monuments.

Close by Bovey Tracey are a number of tors, the most accessible and therefore most popular, because of the magnificent views it offers from its summit, is the bold slab of granite named Hay Tor. Bowerman's Nose resembles a face in profile and folk legend has it that a local man disturbed a coven of witches, who petrified both him and his hound - Hound Tor stands a little distance off! Hound Tor Medieval Village offers scant remains of dwellings, stables and grain stores of three or four farmsteads, inhabited from the Bronze Age (1800-800BC) through to the medieval 14 th cent AD. It is generally considered that by this latter date the climate had so deteriorated that farming these bleak moors was no longer practical and the settlement was abandoned. Granite quarries situated near to Hay Tor, operated in the mid 19 th cent and supplied stone for many notable London Buildings including London Bridge and the British Museum.