A Stopover in Dartmoor

Ever since I read The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was young, I have been fascinated with Dartmoor. In the past, we have spent a lot of time walking on the moors to prehistoric standing stones and stone circles--some older than Stonehenge. It's always been a magical place for me. Once, when Kevin and I were walking up to a tor, one of the stone outcroppings above the moorland, a mist descended. We could see only a short distance. Suddenly, we heard  horses's hooves pounding through the silence. Very quickly, a man and woman in riding gear emerged from the mist on two large brown horses. "Halloo," they cried, and almost immediately dissolved into the mist as quickly as they had appeared. I remember turning to Kevin and asking him, "Were they real?"

We didn't have a lot of time to spend in Dartmoor this time, because we wanted to focus on places in Cornwall that we hadn't been to before. But we were at Cadson Manor a day before Shirley arrived, and so on that day, when we drove to Exeter to pick her up from the train, we spent the morning driving through Dartmoor, stopping at a couple of our favorite spots.

First up, the clapper bridge at Postbridge. Built in medieval times to support people and carts, ancient clapper bridges are built with large stones. I think the one at Postbridge is granite. We have been there several times, beginning in 1982. I have photos visiting that bridge with our son, Aaron, and with our sister-in-law Carol. (Maybe I'll add those old photos when I get home.) 

We also stopped at the Warren House Inn, a pub in the middle of Dartmoor, set within large expanses of moor with only Dartmoor ponies and sheep. The owners of the Warren House Inn claim that their fire has never gone out since 1845 when the "new" pub was built, replacing an older one.

The inn's sign features an emblem of three hares in a circle, joined by their ears. While each appears to have two ears, they share only three ears. The symbol is ancient, going back to Asia and some think it was brought to the West via the Silk Road. It has many meanings, depending on the culture, and it is found in Buddhist, Islamic, and Jewish artefacts, as well as Christian ones. In the West, the symbol refers to the Trinity. However, in Dartmoor, it supposedly was adopted by the tin miners, Yet, interestingly, the Cornwall miners never used the symbol.

Many medieval churches in Dartmoor have the three hares symbol carved into their roof beams. A book researching and documenting the symbol was created by local writers and a photographer. Titled, The Three Hares: A Curiosity Worth Regarding, it is now out of print. (But I have my name on the list of interested persons should it be reprinted.) Someday I would like to visit the Dartmoor churches where the hares are carved. On this trip, however, we simply had a coffee and snack at the inn, appreciating its character.

Driving through the moor provides an opportunity to see the Dartmoor ponies. They have been on Dartmoor for 3,500 years! I think they were once wild, but today they are all owned and just graze on the common land. 

Grazing on Dartmoor is not confined to the ponies. Cows and sheep also dot the landscape, and sometimes you have to stop to let them cross the road.

Dartmoor is rich in legends, far too many to recount here. In previous visits, we  have stayed near the moor and have taken part in letterboxing, an old hobby that started in 1854, which is similar to geocaching today. With geocaching, people are given coordinates to look for hidden boxes. Letterboxing also uses waterproof boxes hidden in rural areas, with clues provided by books, and I think today also by websites. In the past, the letterboxes were mostly old munition boxes, but they are often plastic containers now. Each letterbox includes a stamp, which you can collect in a booklet, leaving your own personal stamp behind. (We always carved ours out of potatoes.) Often, letterboxes were concealed in places associated with legends such as the Hairy Hands, which were said to appear out of nowhere and cause carts or cars to go off track. (Given that I think Harry Hands was not that far from the Warren House Inn, could it have anything to do with drink? No, of course not!) Letterboxes also sometimes hold little trinkets, which you can keep if you put a trinket in the box yourself. It's a great activity to do with family or friends.

On this trip, our stopover was brief. But it was great fun to visit this moor of many spooky tales once again.