The moor looks empty. It is not.
Most people who visit Dartmoor follow the same route: Haytor, the clapper bridge at Postbridge, a look at Dartmoor Prison from the road, then back to the pub. They see the surface and call it done.
The hidden places on Dartmoor, Devon, sit deeper. A Bronze Age village built 3,000 years ago and abandoned long before England existed. A fragment of ancient rainforest where the oaks grow sideways from between boulders the size of cars. A Neolithic burial chamber in a farm field that most people drive past without slowing down. This moor has been occupied, cleared, farmed, and abandoned across six thousand years of human presence, and the evidence survives in plain sight if you know where to look.
These seven locations have no entrance fees, no visitor centres, and most have no signage at all. What they have is the specific atmosphere of places that time has not bothered to clean up.
Region: Dartmoor National Park, Devon
Best for: Ancient history, archaeological sites, atmospheric walking, solitude
Getting there: The B3212 crosses the high moor east to west via Postbridge. A car is essential for all sites listed here. The nearest railway stations are Ivybridge (about 12 miles south), Okehampton (northern moor), and Newton Abbot (eastern edge).
Time needed: Allow 30 minutes to 2 hours per site. Three sites comfortably fill a full day.
Grimspound: A Bronze Age Walled Settlement
Between Hookney Tor and Hameldown Tor, at 450 metres above sea level, the stone remains of a Bronze Age village lie in a fold of the open moor. According to English Heritage, Grimspound dates from the late Bronze Age, roughly 1500 to 800 BC. A boundary wall 150 metres in diameter, averaging three metres thick and still reaching 1.5 metres in height, encloses the bases of 24 roundhouses on a hillside that no road touches.
The Dartmoor Exploration Committee excavated 16 of those houses in the late 19th century and found paved floors, hearths, raised stone benches, cooking holes, and pottery consistent with Bronze Age domestic life. The original entrance faced uphill on the south side, flanked by high walls and roughly paved. A stream running through the northern half of the enclosure supplied the settlement with fresh water.
By around 1000 BC, the people who had cleared Dartmoor’s ancient forests had exposed the fragile upland soil to erosion. With the nutrients depleted, the land could no longer support the same occupation, and the community moved on.
Stand inside the enclosure on a still morning, and the walls catch whatever warmth the day generates. The exposed hillside around them does not. The Bronze Age farmers chose this exact fold for a reason.
Where to Stay: Two Bridges Hotel, Two Bridges, sits 4 miles west on the B3212. A historic moorland hotel with two AA Rosettes, positioned at the junction of two Dartmoor rivers.
Worth Knowing: English Heritage manages Grimspound, and access is free, year-round. A small lay-by on the B3212 serves as parking, from which the site is a 30-minute moorland walk.
Hound Tor Deserted Medieval Village
Most visitors to Hound Tor walk to the granite outcrops and turn back without noticing the village that sits on the lower ground between the tor and Greator Rocks. The settlement appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as belonging to Tavistock Abbey. By the 13th century, the community had built four stone longhouses, three barns, and grain driers cut from local granite.
Each longhouse served as both home and livestock shelter. Families occupied one end; cattle lived in the other, providing warmth through the Devon winter. The buildings stood for over two centuries on this exposed hillside before the climate turned against them.
Around 1300, temperatures dropped and summers shortened. Harvest failures struck in the 1310s. The Black Death arrived in 1348 and killed roughly half the population of England. Archaeologists who excavated the site in the 1960s confirmed the community had abandoned the village by 1400, leaving the stone walls precisely where the last inhabitants left them.
Those floor plans now sit at knee height in the grass. You can walk through a house that stood here for 200 years and has been empty for the past 600 years.
Where to Stay: Lydgate House Hotel, Postbridge. An adults-only Victorian country house hotel on 36 acres of private moorland, 15 minutes by road from Hound Tor.
Worth Knowing: Dartmoor National Park Authority manages the site as a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Parking at the Hound Tor car park off the Manaton road takes about 15 minutes from the village.
Wistman’s Wood: Ancient Oak Woodland on the High Moor
One of the most unusual hidden places on Dartmoor, Devon, has nothing to do with human hWoodry. Wistman’s Wood sits in the valley of the West Dart River near Two Bridges, at 380 to 410 metres above sea level. The Dartmoor National Park Authority describes it as one of three surviving high-altitude oakwoods on the moor and one of the last fragments of the ancient forest that covered Dartmoor around 7,000 years ago.
The Duchy of Woodwall owns the wood. Natural England manages it. The oaks grow from between boulders the size of small cars, their branches coated entirely in moss and lichen. Approximately 120 species of lichens are found within the wood, including Bryoria smithii, the Horsehair lichen, which survives at only two sites in Britain.
The first written record of Wistman’s Wood dates to around 1620, when someone noted the old trees were “no taller than a man may touch to the top with his head.” In 2023, the Prince of Wales announced a partnership with Natural England to double the size of wood by 2040, using acorns gathered from the ancient trees to raise new saplings.
On summer mornings, the wood smells of wet peat and lichen. The boulders hold moisture well after the rest of the moor dries out. The silence inside, in early light before anyone else arrives from the Two Bridges car park, belongs entirely to this place.
Where to Stay: Two Bridges Hotel, Two Bridges. Less than 10 minutes from the woods’ entrance along the West Dart path.
Worth Knowing: Natural England manages visitor access to protect the fragile lichen ecosystem. Check the Dartmoor National Park website at dartmoor.gov.uk before visiting, as access restrictions are in place periodically.
Spinsters’ Rock: Devon’s Oldest Surviving Burial Chamber
In a farm field near the village of Drewsteignton, on the northern edge of Dartmoor, three upright stones support a granite capstone estimated to weigh 16 tons. Spinsters’ Rock is a Neolithic burial chamber built between approximately 3500 and 2500 BC, according to the Journal of Antiquities and multiple archaeological surveys. The capstone sits 2.7 metres above the ground. It is the best-preserved Neolithic tomb in Devon.
Originally, an earthen mound covered the entire structure. Millennia of erosion removed the mound, leaving only the stone skeleton. When archaeologists surveyed the surrounding area, they found stone circles and rows across the road on Shilstone Common, suggesting the burial chamber once formed part of a much larger ceremonial complex that was ploughed away in subsequent centuries.
The stones fell in 1862. A local farmer re-erected them the same year, so the arrangement may not be exactly original, but the stones themselves are authentic, and the structure is sound.
There is no signage, no car park, and no information board. You park on the lane, cross a stile, and walk 100 metres across a farm field to find something that has been standing in this ground since before Britain separated from continental Europe.
Where to Stay: Lydgate House Hotel, Postbridge. 20 minutes by road from Drewsteignton.
Worth Knowing: The site sits on private farmland but remains open to responsible visitors. Keep to the direct path and keep dogs close during lambing season, typically March to May.
The Clapper Bridge at Postbridge
Thousands of people photograph the Postbridge clapper bridge each year. Few of them understand what they are looking at.
Three granite slabs, each more than four metres long and each weighing over eight metric tons, rest on two stone piers above the East Dart River. The bridge dates to the 13th century and appears in records from 1380. Pack horses used it to carry Dartmoor tin across the high moor to the stannary town of Tavistock. That route across the moor has never had a road built along it.
The engineering logic is direct: find the largest available flat stones and lay them across the river. That approach has held for 700 years in one of the most exposed landscapes in southern England. A modern road bridge, built in the 1780s to handle cart traffic, sits 30 metres away. The two structures occupy the same river crossing across five centuries.
Most visitors spend five minutes and leave. Sit on the east bank downstream instead, in late May when the East Dart runs low and clear over granite. The sound of the river carries further than you expect.
Where to Stay: Lydgate House Hotel, Postbridge. Within walking distance of the bridge along the village lane.
Worth Knowing: The Postbridge National Park visitor centre sits immediately adjacent to the parking area and gives useful context on the high moor’s archaeological landscape.
Scorhill Stone Circle: Devon’s Finest
Scorhill stone circle stands on Gidleigh Common in the northeast of Dartmoor, near the confluence of the North Teign River and the Wallabrook. English Heritage designates it as a scheduled monument, and archaeologists consistently describe it as Devon’s finest stone circle. It attracts a fraction of the visitors that far more famous circles receive.
The circle dates to the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 1500 BCE. Scorhill originally held between 51 and 70 stones. Today, 23 stand and 11 lie on the ground. The tallest stone reaches 2.25 metres above the moor. On Midsummer Eve, the sun sets directly behind it.
Flint artefacts on the surrounding moor place human activity here as far back as the Mesolithic, around 8500 BC. The circle forms part of a wider ancient landscape that includes six hut circles, three cairns, and a reave, a prehistoric field boundary of earth and stone, on the slopes around it.
From the nearest parking at Berrydown, near Gidleigh, the walk takes about 45 minutes across open moorland. There are no signs, no tracks, and on most days, no other visitors within sight.
Where to Stay: Two Bridges Hotel, Two Bridges. 12 miles southwest along the B3212.
Worth Knowing: The circle is not visible from any established track until you are close to it. Carry a 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map and a compass. Explorer OL28 covers this section of the moor.
The Warren House Inn
This is a pub, not an ancient monument. But the Warren House Inn stands alone on the high moor between Postbridge and Moretonhampstead, at 434 metres above sea level, and it earns its place among the hidden places on Dartmoor on its own terms.
The current building dates to 1845. Since the fire was first lit that year, it has not gone out. A peat fire burning continuously for nearly 180 years, in a building with no mains electricity, its water drawn from a spring in the hillside behind. At 434 metres, the Warren House Inn is the highest pub in southern England and the second highest in all England.
Tin miners worked the slopes around it for centuries. Their ruined processing sites still sit on the hillsides around the car park. The name refers to the medieval rabbit warrens that covered this ground before the miners arrived.
On a winter crossing of the high moor, the inn functions as a genuine refuge. In summer, it serves food from noon. Either way, there is a particular satisfaction in sitting inside a building that has been exactly this cold and this warm for 180 years without interruption.
Where to Stay: Lydgate House Hotel, Postbridge. 2 miles west along the B3212.
Worth Knowing: No mobile signal at or around the inn. Call ahead on 01822 880208 to confirm opening times before making the journey, particularly in winter.
Practical Tips
- Download offline maps before leaving for any remote site in Dartmoor. Mobile signal disappears across most of the high moor. The AllTrails app carries walking routes to several of the sites above.
- Waterproof boots and a waterproof jacket are non-negotiable, even in June. Dartmoor weather changes without warning.
- Carry a printed 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map as backup. Explorer OL28 covers the majority of the sites in this article.
- Most of these sites rely on roadside lay-bys for parking. Arrive before 10 am in summer to secure a space.
- Grimspound, Scorhill, and Hound Tor village all involve walking on unmarked moorland. Navigate by map and compass. Do not rely solely on your phone.
Responsible Visiting
These are ancient sites, largely unprotected beyond their Scheduled Monument status. Do not remove any stone or artefact. Keep dogs on leads near livestock and in farm fields. Carry all litter off the moor. Do not light fires outside designated areas. Dartmoor’s moorland ecosystem recovers very slowly from physical damage.
Reader Q&A
Are these sites free to visit? All of them. Grimspound, Hound Tor village, Postbridge clapper bridge, Spinsters’ Rock, and Scorhill stone circle charge nothing and operate year-round. Wistman’s Wood is free but subject to periodic access restrictions managed by Natural England. The Warren House Inn is a pub.
Can I reach these places without a car? Postbridge has seasonal bus connections from Princetown and Moretonhampstead, which give you access to the clapper bridge and Wistman’s Wood. All other sites require a car to reach the nearest parking point. Grimspound, Scorhill, and Spinsters’ Rock are not reachable without one.
What time of year works best? Late May to early July gives the best combination of long days, lower visitor numbers than August, and the moor at its most alive. The light on the open tor country in late afternoon during this period is particular to Dartmoor. September and October offer extraordinary atmospheric conditions but shorter days.
Is Dartmoor safe to walk alone? Yes, with basic preparation. The main risks are poor visibility in mist and navigational errors on featureless moorland. Carry a compass and paper map, leave your route with someone at home, and check the forecast before setting out.
Where to Stay
Two Bridges Hotel, Two Bridges. A historic hotel at the junction of two Dartmoor rivers, holding two AA Rosettes for its restaurant. Best placed for Grimspound, Wistman’s Wood, and Scorhill stone circle.
Lydgate House Hotel, Postbridge. Adults-only Victorian country house hotel with 6 rooms on 36 acres of private moorland. Walking distance from the Postbridge clapper bridge. 15 minutes from Hound Tor and Spinsters’ Rock.
The moor does not explain itself. It waits.
