Sensing the elements

13.02.2025

At the end of Burrator Reservoir on the western edge of Dartmoor is Norsworthy Bridge Car Park and a good starting point to take in three very different ancient monuments nestled on moorland north of the River Plym.

A path took me to the edge of a wood, through a gate into brown bracken and fern beyond. I started a shallow climb up to a low crag of strewn rocks, picking my way through them and over the top only to find more of the same the other side. A path came into view and guided me up to Down Tor where once over the rise I saw the most incredible sight of the Down Tor Stone Row, with a tall pointed blocking pillar rising out of the ring cairn and a stone row disappearing down the slope beyond and rising again to a terminal stone over one thousand feet away in the distance. This immediately felt a special place to be, remote and primeval, where only the sounds of the wind and passing birds could be heard. I walked around the cairn with it’s concave ruined centre ringed by closely packed stones of just over a foot in height. Then down the single row to the terminal stone, I stood in the desolate silence and waited for the bubble to burst. It was all wonderfully real despite the dreamscape before me, and as I walked back along the row the sun broke through with a rolling illumination of light on the grass to the cairn ahead of me.

A path took me south east through increasingly boggy ground where a few narrow leats had to be crossed. I descended down into a valley and crossed a river, then followed a deep curving ditch up around to higher ground and on to the head of another much larger valley with the River Plym at it’s centre. I had reached Ditsworthy Warren and spread out in the valley before me was the complex of Drizzlecombe with its three stone rows, cairns and standing stones. The pattern of each of the rows was similar, a row with a cairn at one end and a terminal stone at the other. I followed the stones along the first and shortest row to the Bone Stone at the end. Standing at fourteen feet, it’s the highest of Dartmoor’s standing stones and has a bone shaped bulbous top when viewed from the side. The faint trace of a Chinese character can just be made out on the northern face, made by a visiting Chinese student in the 1950’s. A better view of the complex could be seen from the top of the Giant’s Basin, a now ruinous cairn with a sunken centre. The area would have been well populated in Bronze Age times with the River Plym nearby, an important element to the surrounding settlements. Again this felt like a special landscape, with no buildings or pilons to distract the eye and no trace of a jet stream overhead. I followed row one which became a double row for half its length before the single row took over again to yet another tall standing stone at the end. This stone was lean and had poise and was a fitting place to move off from Drizzlecombe.

I followed the course of the Plym for a while to an old derelict farm house. The driveway guided me north again towards the imposing profile of Gutter Tor. At the junction with a quiet road I found myself having to get around a shallow flooded river bank. I was on the fringe of the moor here where I kept to a field wall that lead up to higher and firmer ground. The gorse bushes fooled me into thinking they were stones as I scanned left and right. OS Maps came to my rescue and guided me to the low lying multi ringed circle of Yellowmead. This was a rare layout of four circles one inside the other with the inner and outer rings having the tallest stones. Unfortunately the ground cover here was not as low as I had expected but there was still good enough definition to make it out . There was no longer any visual evidence of the cairn that had once occupied the inner circle and the same could be said for the stone row that had been pilfered for building work. The landscape around it was alone worth being there for, with Sheeps Tor to the west and Sharpitor to the north. I stood still in the centre of the circle sensing all the question marks floating around me and all the secrets buried deep down at it’s heart.

It was not long till the light would start to fade and the weather was turning, so I made my way down off the moor to Burrator Forest to end my five hour circular walk.