Landing strips for the mind

16.02.2025

I was parked up in the National Parks Office car park and in a prime spot for a visit to the Bellever Forest Bronze Age complex just over the road. The forest was planted in 1921 by the Duchy of Cornwall and is now managed by Forestry England who have uncovered the cairns and rows that laid forgotten for many years.

As with Fernworthy Forest, Bellever does not sit easy in the landscape, with the regimented planting contrary to the barren landscape around it. The straight trails that dissect it are not particularly rewarding to walk but the one I was on brought me out into a clearing that was peppered with a number of sites that were known collectively as Lakehead Hill. The tuffs of dead grass were quite high and hid the low lying stones I was looking for. However after some hunting, a cairn circle came into view by the tree line, with a centre cist and a capstone. There was a beleaguered feel to the cairn, like it had had a beating over the years and was now out for the count. This was the feeling I got from the other cairns nearby. However the stone row further on was in more open ground with room to breath. It ran across the clearing towards a gap in the tree line. I followed it to the last stone and then made for the gap where I suspected the main attraction may be. In it’s own clearing was a well preserved raised burial cist complete with stone sides and a capstone. It sat in the middle of a stone row that curved in an arc for over one hundred feet. The few stones that remained around the cist created a vague circle. I had not seen anything like this layout before and my first thought was that it might have been the remains of a vast circle. However I soon dismissed the thought having already seen slightly curving rows elsewhere. Then I wondered if the rows had once connected with the one I had just come from, or were all the cairns in the area once interconnected by stone rows ?

Back at the National Parks Office I had a look around the museum displaying replica Bronze Age jewelry and a small collection of axe heads and arrow tips. The jewelry had been recently discovered in a cist at Whitehorse Hill along with the remains of a young woman. The peaty soil and waterlogging had preserved the finds remarkably well.

I drove down through Two Bridges and parked up at Merrivale. I climbed the bank and walked the short distance to what has become the most visited Bronze Age site on Dartmoor. It was the second time I had visited Merrivale and on seeing it again it impressed me as much as my first encounter. The main feature are the three double rows of teethlike pointed stones that run for a total length of sixteen hundred feet. Row one runs parallel with rows two and three and each of the rows terminates at either a cairn or a blocking stone. There was something architecturally very pleasing about the straightness of the rows and as with my last visit I felt compelled to walk their full length, hoping to conjure visions, or to pass through a time portal of some kind. I left the rows firmly planted in the present and headed for the standing stone and stone circle. The circle came into view first with it’s low well spaced eleven stones, but very soon my eyes were drawn to the ten foot tall standing stone beyond with it’s flat sides and tapered top. It was an ambiguous structure that tricked the eye, looking quite straight from one angle and slightly leaning from another. Nearby lay a six foot stone that may once have stood as a companion or as a blocking stone for three short rows nearby. I walked back to the main rows crossing the leats that intersect them and stood at the two blocking stones at the end of row three and gazed along these landing strips for the mind.