Thread by @fenifur

I’m going to do one of my long but hopefully interesting (at least in part) walking threads, for a very special bit of Dartmoor. Lots of people visit the two tors, but seeing a broader view of the prehistoric landscape can really put it into a new perspective, twas a good walk 🙂

We parked near the Holming Beam car park, I had promised Pat the weather would be ‘better than when we walked to the Beardown Man’..
reader, it was not.
Undeterred (as it wasn’t exactly RAINY, just misty) we head off to find out what a Holming Beam was (we still don’t know).

I take him to all the best places, there’s even some bamboo! So fancy. ☺️ There was a fair bit of debris out from the firing the day before, too.

I promise this walk will get more (moor, ha ha) cheery, but here we set out across the first 1 1/2 miles of about 5 miles in total of bog, towards the wonderfully named ‘Black Dunghill’. It’s at times like that I wonder if Pat actually has too much faith in me 🤔

Most people walk over and down to the Walkham valley. My route followed the old Prison leat towards Great Mis Tor. Usually it means there’s dry ground along the edge, this was mostly true 😅
At this point some blue sky appeared so bad weather complaints were no longer allowed.

There were lots of moths about, and I found a lovely emperor moth cocoon (that’s the caterpillar and the cocoon down, just the moth left to spot 😅). Also came across some quarrying debris, now inhabited by soldier lichen.

The rest of the walk to the top of Great Mis Tor was nice and easy. Here is where we saw the ponies 🐴 The view from this Tor is absolutely spectacular, if you can’t manage longer walks but could do 3 miles, there’s a nice there and back with parking thats well worth doing.

Great Mis Tor has a nice rock basin; ‘The Devil’s Frying pan’. Still thought by some to have been made by Druids, the basins probably form when weak feldspar crystals are split by frozen water in a hollow, fragments are later blown away and gradually the hollow expands.

Of course there’s nothing to say they weren’t used for ritual purposes in the past. Great Mis Tor also has a great, huge nook and a slab perfect for a sacrificial altar👀 There are some good rock faces too. I’ve noticed that there aren’t usually cairns on Tors with basins though.

From here we descended to the Walkham river and the Grimstone head weir, which takes water to the Grimstone and Sortridge leat. It never stops feeling weird seeing water flow UPhill - although the devonport leat is a better example of this

On the way down you can see the settlement across the valley on Langstone moor. The valley itself is really beautiful, similar to the Tavy, on a smaller scale. Lots of little mini waterfalls and a lovely sheltered feeling. Then it’s over some slightly ineffectual stepping stones.

The settlement is Bronze Age and well preserved - 5 enclosures and more than 50(!) huts can be seen, some still with doorposts. They would have had turf or thatch roofs. Excavations showed raised dais, hearths and cooking holes and flint core, flakes and a scraper also recovered.

About 200m away,not visible from the settlement,is a stone circle. Restoration to their original socket holes in 1894, meant they were available for target practice for American soldiers in WW2😬
3 stones out of 16 remain fully intact. One was being used as a scratching post🐮

(Yes I am still going, ironically Im getting distracted with walks on Dartmoor 😅)
Another half a mile away is The Langstone. A 3 metre high, distinctively shaped Menhir. Sadly also used as target practice, although one bullet hole does look like a lovely sun 🌞

We decided to take a quick detour up White Tor, as it’s such a lovely one. There are the remains of huts, cairns and evidence of reeves and camps dating back to the Neolithic.

Then came the easiest stretch, out past White Barrow along the Lichway or Lych Way. In the 1200’s farmers on Dartmoor, some up to 12 miles away (17 when cataloo steps were impassable) were expected to walk to Lydford not just to bury their dead, but attend church every Sunday!

In 1260 the fed up tenement dwellers partitioned the Bishop of Exeter for permission to attend church at Widecombe which was closer. The Bishop granted their request, however people still had to attend the Forest and Stannary courts that were held at Lydford until the 1800’s.

Here we descended to Traveller’s Ford. Don’t be fooled by the friendly name, the area is very boggy, and the Ford a fair few inches deep! We had planned to follow the river, but time constraints (we’d ordered a pizza for 7.30pm in Widecombe 😅) led us up the side of Beardown Tors

In the end, the going up here was so boggy that we’d probably have been just as quick down in the valley! But we had some lovely views and there were lots of skylarks and wheatears around.

Then it was across the Cowsic river on Holming Beam bridge, up the sharp hill and back up the track at Holming beam. Some surprisingly lovely views greeted us, they’d been hidden by the mist in the morning! #Dartmoor

A drive to collect our pizza from @oldinnwidecombe and we inhaled it in about 3 minutes whilst watching the sun set over the bit of the moor we’d just walked ☺️