Dartmoor National Park

A Morning at Dartmoor National Park

When Sarah from our BugBitten team pulled off the B3387 just before seven in the morning, the moor was doing that thing it does in early summer — rolling out of the mist like something being slowly revealed rather than simply appearing. The car park below Hay Tor held two other vehicles. A border collie was already racing across the granite-strewn slope above, its owner a distant silhouette. Sarah laced up her boots, zipped her windproof to the chin despite the fact that June was technically underway, and started walking.

By the time she reached the top of Hay Tor — a stack of weathered granite that rises about 457 metres above sea level — the cloud had thinned enough to show Widecombe-in-the-Moor sitting in its valley below like a stage set. There were no queue ropes, no ticket booths, no audio guides. Just rock and wind and the faint sound of a skylark somewhere overhead. She ate a mandarin on the summit and watched a pair of walkers emerge from the mist on the western approach. That was it for company. By the time she was back at the car, she'd covered six kilometres, seen two Dartmoor ponies grazing close enough to the track that she had to step around them, and found the remains of what turned out to be an old granite tramway barely marked on the signage. That morning is why Dartmoor stays with you.

What Makes This Spot Worth Your Time

Dartmoor is not a polished experience. It does not flatter visitors or soften its edges. What it offers instead is something increasingly rare in the south of England — genuine wildness at scale, and the freedom to move through it largely on your own terms.

The park covers roughly 954 square kilometres of upland Devon and contains within it a staggering density of ancient human activity. You can walk for an hour across open moorland and pass Bronze Age stone rows, medieval field systems, and the ruins of tin and copper mines from the 18th and 19th centuries without a single interpretive board in sight. Dartmoor does not announce itself. You either know what you're looking at or you carry a good map and a bit of curiosity, and the place rewards both.

The tors are the most immediate draw. These aren't mountains in any technical sense — Dartmoor's highest point, High Willhays, reaches 621 metres — but the granite outcrops that crown the ridgelines have a sculptural quality that stops people in their tracks. Some look as though they've been stacked by hand. Others are so weathered and rounded that they seem almost alive, as though the rock is still very slowly moving. Hound Tor, in the eastern moor, is the one that tends to convert people who arrive expecting scenery and leave having felt something more unsettling and more memorable.

What also sets Dartmoor apart from other upland areas in England — including the excellent woodland walks of the Forest of Dean further north in Gloucestershire — is the near-total absence of tree cover across much of it. The moor's exposure is the point. The weather arrives unobstructed, the light changes fast, and the horizon feels very far away.

How the Area Feels

To visit Dartmoor is to spend time in a landscape that genuinely seems indifferent to your presence. This isn't said to be poetic. It's just accurate. The moor doesn't perform. The Dartmoor ponies, a hardy semi-wild breed that has grazed here for centuries, will walk within a few metres of you and demonstrate absolutely no interest in the fact that you're there. The bogs don't care whether you've read about them in advance. The cloud comes down regardless of what the forecast said at breakfast.

That quality of indifference is, for many people, the whole appeal. Dartmoor is one of the few places in southern England where you can feel properly small — where the landscape isn't framed for you, lit for you, or interpreted for you. You can walk a dozen kilometres on the northern moor and see no one at all. You can sit beside a Bronze Age stone circle at Merrivale on a weekday afternoon and hear nothing but wind. That sense of quiet is not incidental to the Dartmoor experience. It is the experience.

The towns at the edges of the moor carry their own particular character. Princetown, sitting on the high moor at around 430 metres, is the highest town in England and feels it — the buildings hunch against the weather, the Dartmoor Prison (still operational) looms on the edge of town, and the pub fires are lit more months of the year than not. Moretonhampstead on the eastern fringe is gentler, with independent shops and a decent café scene. Okehampton in the north has good access to the higher tors and serves as a practical base without pretending to be a tourist destination.

What to Actually Do Here

Walk the Tors

The most direct way to understand Dartmoor is to walk between tors. The Hay Tor to Hound Tor route (roughly eight kilometres return via the ridge) is the most popular, and popular here means you might encounter thirty or forty people on a busy weekend — which is nothing by national park standards. Hound Tor is the more atmospheric of the two, and just below it you'll find the remains of Houndtor Deserted Medieval Village, a cluster of stone foundations abandoned around the 14th century. It's not signposted dramatically. You just come upon it.

For something more demanding, the walk from Okehampton to High Willhays and Yes Tor is the best high-ground route in the park. These are the two highest points in southern England, and on a clear day the views extend to Bodmin Moor in the west and Exmoor to the north. The ground is boggy in places and the path intermittent — this is a navigation-required walk, not a waymarked trail.

Find the Prehistoric Sites

Dartmoor contains the largest concentration of Bronze Age monuments in the United Kingdom. The Merrivale Stone Rows are perhaps the most accessible — a short walk from a small car park on the B3357 brings you to a double row of standing stones stretching for 260 metres across the moor. There's also a stone circle, a kistvaen (a type of burial cist), and a standing stone all within a few hundred metres of each other. No admission charge. No barriers.

Grimspound, on the northern edge of the southern moor, is a walled Bronze Age settlement that once enclosed around 24 hut circles. It sits in a shallow valley and takes about twenty minutes to walk to from the road. You can walk through it, sit inside the hut circles, and read it as the landscape rather than as a museum piece.

For those interested in World Heritage-level prehistoric landscapes more broadly, it's worth noting that sites like Stonehenge and Avebury appear on the UNESCO World Heritage List — Dartmoor's monuments are not yet listed at that level, but they are arguably more accessible and considerably less crowded.

Swim and Paddle

Wild swimming in Dartmoor is serious business, and the rivers here — the Dart, the Teign, the Bovey — are cold enough to warrant respect even in summer. The East Dart at Dartmeet has several natural pools that are popular with families on hot days. The river at Spitchwick Common, a short drive from Ashburton, has a broader reach and a grassy bank that fills up on warm weekends. Come early or come mid-week. The water temperature rarely exceeds 16°C even in August — that's bracingly cold, not dangerous, but know what you're getting into.

When to Go (and When Not to)

May through September covers the practical walking window. June and July give you the longest days and the most reliable weather, though "reliable" on Dartmoor is always relative — the moor generates its own cloud, and a morning forecast of sunshine can turn to zero-visibility fog by midday without warning. September is often the best compromise: the summer crowds thin out, the bracken starts turning, and the light in the afternoon is very good.

Avoid the moor in heavy rain if you're a first-time visitor. The bogs are not an exaggeration. There are areas in the north and west of the park — Raybarrow Pool, Fox Tor Mires — where the ground will take a boot up to the knee without any particular warning. The OS map marks them as wet ground, but the scale doesn't convey how quickly they can worsen.

Winter walking is absolutely possible and often spectacular — frost on the tors, snow on the high moor, nobody else around. But you need solid navigation skills, appropriate clothing, and an awareness that conditions can change in under an hour.

Before heading into the northern quarter near Okehampton and Sourton, always check the Dartmoor Ranges live firing notice. The military uses a significant portion of the northern moor for training, and the red flags go up more often than people expect. It's a straightforward online check and worth the thirty seconds.

How to Get There and Nearby Stops

Dartmoor has no single entrance point — it's a park you approach from several directions depending on where you want to walk.

By car: This remains the most practical way to access the more remote parts. The B3387 from Bovey Tracey takes you directly to Hay Tor. The B3212 cuts through the middle of the moor from Moretonhampstead to Princetown. Parking at the popular tors costs a few pounds and fills up fast on sunny weekends — arrive by nine to get a space without stress.

By public transport: The Dartmoor Sunday Rover bus (number 672 and 173) runs seasonally from Newton Abbot and Exeter, hitting Hay Tor, Widecombe, Princetown, and other stops. It's a genuine option for linear walks where you start at one stop and finish at another. Outside summer, services thin considerably.

By bicycle: Road cycling on the lanes that cross the moor is excellent — quiet roads, long climbs, and descents worth the effort. Mountain biking is limited to bridleways, but there are dedicated routes around Burrator Reservoir and in the Plym Valley.

Nearby: If you're spending more than a day or two in Devon, there's genuinely a lot of ground to cover — check out more places in Devon for ideas that sit alongside a Dartmoor trip. And if you're travelling with children who need something more structured mid-trip, a detour to Twycross Zoo in the Midlands on the way back north is worth a look.

The Not-So-Good Bits

Dartmoor asks more of you than many national parks, and that's worth being honest about.

Parking on busy days is a genuine problem. The Hay Tor car park, the Dartmeet layby, and the Becky Falls approach all fill up by mid-morning on sunny bank holiday weekends. There's no overflow system. People park on verges, block passing places, and then have a bad time. If you're going in summer, go early or accept a longer walk from a quieter spot.

Phone signal is patchy at best. In the central and northern moor, you can expect long stretches with no signal at all. Google Maps navigation will not save you if the cloud comes down. This isn't a complaint — it's just what you need to know. Carry the OS Explorer OL28 map in paper form and know how to use a compass. That's not optional on the high moor.

The bogs are real and some are serious. First-time visitors sometimes treat them as a novelty and occasionally end up losing a boot or getting into genuine difficulty. Stick to paths where paths exist, use the map to identify wet areas before you're in them, and avoid the most notorious bog zones in wet weather unless you know what you're doing.

It can be bleak in a way that affects some people. The moor has almost no shelter from wind or rain across large sections. There are no café stops, no conveniently positioned pubs, no buildings of any kind across many square kilometres of the high moor. For some walkers, that's the point. For others, it turns an enjoyable day into an uncomfortable one. Know which category you're in before you commit to a long route.

Final Word from the BugBitten Team

Dartmoor is not somewhere you visit once, absorb, and cross off. It's somewhere you come back to. The landscape is too large, too changeable, and too layered with history to be consumed in a long weekend.

What strikes the BugBitten team most about the place is that it doesn't need you to feel anything in particular about it. The prehistoric stone rows at Merrivale were there thousands of years before the word "tourist" existed, and they'll be there long after. The moor operates on a different timescale. You can respect that and move through the place carefully, or you can treat it as a backdrop for Instagram content — but Dartmoor will not adjust itself either way.

There's something genuinely important about that. In a world where the UNESCO World Heritage Centre works constantly to protect humanity's most significant landscapes and sites from the pressures of modern life, Dartmoor represents a case study in a different kind of preservation — one where the land itself is formidable enough to resist the worst of it.

Go. Walk further than you planned. Get slightly cold. Lose the phone signal. You'll be back.