‘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 Iron Age men were next to live on Dartmoor as the remains at Kes Tor proved, where a whole community dwelt, with an iron-smelter's house and workshop nearby in its own pound. The date has now come up to the fifth century BC. Then there appears to be a gap in the human occupation of the moor from about 400BC until the coming of the Anglo-Saxons at about 700AD.
It was at this time that the houses changed from the round hut circles of the Bronze Age to rectangular shapes with their surrounding field systems. The remains of these houses are stone-walled but excavation has discovered that very often below the foundation are the post holes of wattle and turf huts from earlier times, the sites having been rebuilt on many times. The medieval village at Houndtor is perhaps the best-known example. By the various dating systems used, it is interesting to find that the early Saxons built in wood though there were large quantities of stone available and there must have been evidence of earlier men building in stone. It was not until about 1200 that stone buildings reappear.
All through the early days of the Saxons and into medieval times Dartmoor was not actually claimed by any group but plenty of people took advantage of the good summer grazing and drove their sheep and cattle onto the moor as the many lanes leading up onto the high land indicate.
It was the Normans who made Dartmoor one of the royal hunting forests and so began the organisation of administration and allocation of land on the moor. The name Dartmoor Forest has persisted from this time and can be misleading. It was a term used for a royal hunting area and did not necessarily mean that the land was covered with forests. It was also about this time that the ancient Dartmoor tenements were founded and the whole conception of ‘commoners’ who had grazing rights on the moorland started.
Tin was mined in Cornwall in the times of the Bronze Age but we first find documentary evidence of alluvial tin in streaming in the year 1156, near Sheepstor and Brisworthy. In that year about 60 tons of smelted tin were produced. Within fifteen years or so the production had risen to over 300 tons a year.
So the early tinners used an opencast mining system working on the broad, shallow, river valleys where the rich tin deposits had been carried by floods and were contained in the sands and gravels. The larger stones containing tin ores were crushed in primitive mills and then washed or streamed with the other tin-bearing sand from the river bed. Smelting took place over a peat fire which produced impure lumps of tin but there were also more refined smelting centres.
By the 13th century blowing houses had been introduced for smelting where charcoal was used as the fuel and the molten metal ran from the furnace into the moulds. The name blowing house comes from the fact that huge bellows were used, powered by water wheels, to help produce the intense heat needed. Quite a few remains of blowing houses can be found on Dartmoor though not many have the moulds and wheel pits to be seen.
Medieval Village, Walk 36
The output decreased over the years and by 1243 only 40 tons were produced, but tin streaming continued until shallow adit mining began in the 15th and 16th centuries and later still this method was changed again to shaft mining in the 18th and 19th centuries.
So all over Dartmoor you have the evidence of the work of the tinners throughout the ages, from the mounds of rubble left behind after the early streaming, great gullies of opencast mining, to the old ruins of the buildings, wheel pits and engine houses of more recent times.
The tinners themselves in medieval times were probably small farmers who tried to add to their meagre living by forming small groups to search for tin. However, during this period the tinners were a powerful and favoured group of workers with a large number of privileges which included exemption from certain taxes and dues, and from serving on juries and with a right to form their own militia. All these privileges seem to stem from the formation of the stannaries which controlled the tin industry and taxed it for the Crown.
Dartmoor itself was a stannary and was almost a self-governing country with its own laws, courts and even a jail. So it was that the tinners had rights, privileges and protection as providers of royal taxes which put them beyond many of the laws of the rest of the land.
Each of the stannary areas has a town where the taxes or coinage were collected and these towns were around the edge of Dartmoor: Tavistock, Chagford, Ashburton and so on. The countryside under the control of these coinage towns covered vast areas even as far as the north coast of Devon but the boundaries all met at Crockern Tor in the middle of the Dartmoor stannary. This led to the Great Court or Parliament of Crockern Tor sitting at this windswept part of the moor, the first recorded meeting of which was in 1494. It was here that the huge task of setting the laws and rules of the tin industry were worked out. The day to day administration was dealt with by courts in the stannary towns where they also heard legal cases to do with the tin industry such as wrangles over ownership of land, bad management, even common assault. As I said, the tinners were a law unto themselves but they dealt
