View from Hound Tor, Dartmoor

Today we went to a part of Dartmoor I've never seen before, and which Mr PP hasn't visited for 45 years. It reminded him of an iron-age settlement elsewhere on Dartmoor, where he slept overnight, alone, as part of some survival training exercise, in the mid-to-late 1960s. He recalls gazing up at the stars and feeling a connection with the iron age people who once inhabited that piece of the Devon moorland.

This is the view from the top of the tor looking across the moor. Find the sticking-up rock, to the right of the picture and follow straight up to where it points, and you might make out the remains of an abandoned medieval farming village, in the paler green (bracken-free) clearing.

Only the foundation stones remain, but you can see where the longhouses and barns stood in the thirteenth century. The village was abandoned around the fifteenth century and its remains were excavated in the 1960s.

We descended to enjoy some twenty-first century humour, with nineteenth-twentieth century references to Conan Doyle, when Mr and Miss PP had cups of tea and I had a Magnum ice-cream from the 'Hound of the Basket Meals' wagon - complete with 'MUT' in its vehicle registration number. How we chuckled!

Super day! It's where we had hoped to take Firstborn last week, when bad weather stopped play. As Mr PP joshed, it was nearly as good taking Girl-Child!

If you're interested in knowing more about the site's history, have a look at this English Heritage link.