Dartmoor
Southern England's high wild — a granite dome of tors and blanket bog carrying the densest Bronze Age landscape in Britain, and the only place in England with a court-tested right to sleep out.
Dartmoor is the largest and highest of the granite bosses that surface along the spine of south-west England — one exposed knuckle of the batholith that runs under Devon and Cornwall to the Scilly Isles — and the national park designated over it in 1951 was among Britain's first. The granite weathers into tors, the freestanding stacks of onion-skinned rock that crown almost every summit, several hundred of them between Haytor's tourist-polished whaleback and the remote piles of the north moor, where High Willhays reaches 621 metres — the highest ground in England south of the Peak District. Between the tors lies the real substance of the place: miles of blanket bog and purple moor-grass, the sponge that feeds most of Devon's rivers, and in the Taw's infant valley the crouching, moss-upholstered dwarf oaks of Wistman's Wood, a fragment of the high-altitude forest that once covered the hills.
People have marked this moor more densely than almost anywhere in Europe. Bronze Age farmers left thousands of hut circles, cairns and stone rows — the Merrivale rows run beside the Tavistock road, and Grimspound's walled pound with its two dozen hut foundations is the textbook site — before a wetter climate pushed them off the heights around 1000 BC, leaving a landscape effectively fossilised under the peat. The later layers are sparser and stranger: medieval clapper bridges like Postbridge's, tinners' gullies, the brooding bulk of Dartmoor Prison at Princetown, built in 1809 for Napoleonic prisoners of war, and the Victorian pastime of letterboxing, invented in 1854 when the guide James Perrott left a jar at Cranmere Pool for visitors' calling cards — the ancestor of geocaching, still played across the moor.
Dartmoor also carries a distinction no other English landscape has: a right to backpack camp on the open commons, contested by a landowner in the Darwall case and confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2025 after three years in the courts — a verdict celebrated on the moor as a second Kinder Scout moment. It comes with the moor's own conditions. The northern plateau is a live military training area (Okehampton, Willsworthy and Merrivale ranges), walkable most days but closed under red flags, and Conan Doyle chose this terrain for The Hound of the Baskervilles for good reason: the mists are quick and the mires — Fox Tor Mires was his Grimpen — are real.
What's worth knowing before you go
The park is unusually reachable: the Dartmoor Line from Exeter to Okehampton, reopened in 2021 after half a century, puts the wild north moor within a platform's walk of a mainline connection, and Ivybridge station sits on the southern edge; Princetown, Postbridge and Widecombe are the interior villages. Check the range firing times before any north-moor day, give the free-roaming ponies their distance (feeding them is both an offence and the reason they mob car parks), and treat river crossings seriously after rain. The connoisseur's target is the north-west corner around Tavy Cleave, the moor's most dramatic gorge — or a night under the stars near Cranmere Pool, sleeping inside the oldest game in English rambling.