Walking on Dartmoor. Earle John
over the slopes leading up to the tors. These rocks are called clitters and were broken off the main mass of the rotten tors as they became exposed, by water freezing in the cracks and joints and finally pushing them off onto the slopes around.
Finally I refer you once again to the geology books if you want to follow up more details about the tors and the formation of Dartmoor.
Vegetation
Dartmoor usually conjures up thoughts of mists and quaking bogs; Great Grimpen Mire of The Hound of the Baskervilles. A lot of the moor is indeed bogland and while there are a few areas, usually very small pockets, where a horse or a bullock could sink in, and I presume human beings, there are no bottomless pits like quicksands covering large areas of moorland. After rain a lot of Dartmoor makes for wet walking and you have the extraordinary situation of bogs on the top of the moorland – not just by the streams and in river valleys. This is the blanket bog found in areas of eighty inches of rain in a year. Here grow bog asphodel and tormental with sphagnums, also a little heather with sages.
Peat made up of fibrous dead roots forms in areas where the angle of the ground is less than 15 degrees and again where there is abundant rainfall. Then you find areas of valley bogs; marshlands with reeds and the sources of streams and rivers. Here also is found sphagnum as well as cotton grasses, pale butterwort, bog asphodel, sundews and bog violet. The wet areas of moorland that are not blanket bog have got cotton grass, ling and bell heather and purple moor grass.
On the drier moor it is heather and in other areas whortleberry that thrive. Bracken grows in profusion also on the lower slopes of the drier moors and after swaling or burning the heather, bracken will colonise large areas.
On the high moor itself the three ancient woodlands of Wistman's Wood, Black Tor Beare and Piles Copse are fascinating. They are all three found on the west-facing clitter slopes and the trees are mainly stunted oak, never more than 3–5m (10–16ft) high, with a few mountain ash. On the floor of these woodlands, on or among the rocks, are mosses, ferns, wood rushes, lichens, liverworts and whortleberries, while epiphytics festoon the branches of the trees themselves. Even the barren granite tors have mosses and liverworts in the deep crevices and lichens on the rock faces.
Finally there are the delightful wooden stream and river valleys that run down from the granite moorland. The vegetation in them is often profuse: golden saxifrage and sphagnum, stonecrop, daffodil, wild garlic and St John's wort.
Fauna
I mentioned briefly a few of the creatures you can see on Dartmoor: buzzards, red grouse, foxes and skylarks. If you are lucky you might also come across badgers at dusk or the shy, almost extinct otter by the rippling streams and rivers. Stoats, weasels and the ferocious mink that has now colonised certain areas having escaped or been let loose from mink farms, can all be discovered. Rabbits still breed and live in profusion in spite of myxamatosis. The harmless grass snake and the not so harmless adder basks on the warm rocks in summer, as do lizards.
Gorse
Red Campion
Kestrels with pulsating wings hang on the air and the sparrow hawk also hunts the moor. Ravens, carrion crows and rooks are all inhabitants of the margins of Dartmoor. The crows and ravens are hated by farmers at lambing time when they are quick to see the weak, helpless lambs and move in for the kill. On the higher moor the wheatear starts to arrive in March from Africa, to breed here; in Victorian times these small birds were considered a delicacy on many dinner tables.
By the rivers, the dipper, that remarkable little black and white bird that seems to fly underwater and builds its nest on overhanging rocks just above flood level, darts about with low flitting flight. You will often disturb an old grey heron fishing in the streams and rivers and off he will go with long, languid flaps of his great wings.
Early purple orchid with bluebells
Primroses
The moorland streams themselves are the homes of the brown trout and salmon and the beautiful salmon trout called peel in Devon.
Finally black slugs will appear on moist, damp days and probably the Dartmoor midges. A vast number of insects are found including honey bees, dragonflies and spiders while butterflies and caterpillars, including the Emperor Moth, catch the eye with their bright colours.
Man has grazed his animals on Dartmoor from the time of the Bronze Age and herds of cattle still roam certain areas, while large flocks of sheep, including the Scottish black-face that has done so much damage to the whortleberries, are found almost everywhere.
But it is the ponies that most people associate with Dartmoor. They are called ‘wild ponies’ but they are all owned, in fact, by the farmers who have commoner's grazing rights and if you look closely you will see that they have brand marks on them. They are rounded up twice a year but the most important ‘drift’, as they call it on Dartmoor, is in the autumn for the local pony markets. When you look at the ponies on the moor you soon realise that they are a mixture of many different breeds that have been introduced into the area. However, there are a few studs that are trying to purify the strain and get back to the thoroughbred pony, the true emblem of Dartmoor.
Man on Dartmoor
It has often been said that Dartmoor is a landscape fashioned by man, which up to a point is true. Man probably first wandered onto the uplands of Dartmoor as a hunter as early as 8000BC when the moor was a wild, mountainous region of towering tors, very different from that which we see today. These men from the Old Stone Age actually lived in the limestone caves and rock shelters of the coastal areas of Torbay and Plymouth, but they left hardly any signs of their visits and certainly did nothing to change the landscape of Dartmoor.
Neolithic man also came up onto the moor and may well have settled there but archaeologists have found no evidence of this. What is clear, however, is that forest clearance had started on Dartmoor before this period and certainly continued through the Bronze Age when man first came to live on the uplands.
So it is with Bronze Age Man, from around 2000BC until about 500BC, that we have the first evidence of man's dwellings and activities on the moor, by which time the topography was very much as we know it today. One of the great delights of walking on Dartmoor is that it gives you the chance to visit some of the many Bronze Age remains to be found there. Dartmoor is perhaps one of the richest areas in the world for prehistoric sites. Even on the shortest walks one usually stumbles on some evidence of Bronze Age Man. There are the hut circles that usually occur in groups, sometimes within a surrounding wall or pound. In recent times archaeologists have shown great interest in the old reaves or long earth and stone banks that mark ancient fields and territorial boundaries. There are many barrows and cairns, the old burial sites where in some cases the earth and stones have disappeared leaving the actual burial chambers themselves, called kists or kistvaens, looking like large stone boxes. Near these burial mounds you can often find the mysterious stone rows and standing stones or menhirs. Nobody is really sure why they were put up but the stone circles may have been places of worship and the stone rows often lead towards the bigger barrows or burial mounds. There have been attempts to explain them as markers for the seasons or solstices or even phases of the moon, but for whatever reason they were erected, the larger circles and rows are well worth visiting. The longest stone row on Dartmoor, by the way, is over two miles long, near the River Erme and Erme Pound.
Hut circle near Grimspound, Walk 24
A tinner's Mould Stone
Early