Dartmoor: Princetown
 Abbeys |
Princetown is Dartmoor at its bleakest, greyest, grimmest and wildest - the ideal place to have a maximum-security prison. The ‘town' claims to be the highest in England at 1400ft above sea level; this ensures that it suffers above average fog, rain, wind and snow - a less desirable choice of place to live it would be hard to find. For those interred for life perhaps the choices are restricted - redemption or damnation.
The town came into being through the infamous Dartmoor Prison, built there in 1806 by French prisoners of war captured during the Napoleonic Wars. A little later, between 1812-14, American prisoners joined the French ones, captured in the American War of Independence. At one time 7000 men were confined in the vast grey prison blocks with 500 soldiers guarding them. The overcrowded cells led to unsanitary conditions and ill health was prevalent; around 1000 French and American prisoners died from ‘gaol' fever. Closed between 1816-50 the prison was reopened at the recommendation of Prince Albert in order to house long-term convicts, and so it has continued to do until the present day. Princetown is not an enjoyable experience, its sense of desolation and greyness is overbearing; never intended as a beauty spot or holiday resort it is what it is, a place to escape from.
South of Princetown, in the depths of the wilderness, an isolated row of houses stands incongruously in a place of unutterable bleakness called Whiteworks; near by are the long-ruined buildings of a once flourishing tin mine, abandoned by man in the last century home now to fierce elemental forces. Further to the south, and deeper onto the wind-torn moors, stands the seven-foot-high Nun's Cross, the highest medieval cross in Dartmoor; it marks the Abbots' Way, an ancient route connecting the abbeys at Buckfast and Buckland. Here it was, at a point of unsurpassed desolation, that Conan Doyle imagined his unleashed hell-hound to have met its end.
North of Princetown, beyond Two Bridges, which is little more than its name suggests, stands the hamlet of Postbridge. It is famous for its clapper bridge, a type of river crossing unique to Dartmoor, built by medieval farmers and tin-workers in the 13 th and 14 th cent. There are thirty such bridges on the moor, but the one at Postbridge is the finest example. Its four huge slabs of granite, weighing up to 8 tons each and measuring up to 15ft long by 7ft wide, have been carefully placed over the East Dart on three sturdy granite piers.