Field Trip to Dartmoor National Park - Take 2

As part of my sabbatical leave I am planning a two-week field course that, if taught, will visit sites of geological interest in southwestern England (and possibly Ireland). Christine and I are taking a weekday every few weeks to explore a potential field trip site. Last week we visited a possible site in a different corner of Dartmoor National Park than we visited the first time. This particular hike explored a variety of landscapes, from bleak moorland and high tors

to wooded valleys with swift flowing streams.

There were, of course, also some Bronze Age relics, chapels and pubs thrown into the mix.

This particular hike was 10 miles long and is about 12 miles from our cottage. We started at an abandoned quarry car park,

before beginning on a long, uphill walk

past some of the Dartmoor ponies,

on our way to White Tor, seen here in the background behind Christine.

I don't know why this particular tor is named White Tor because the rocks are decidedly dark in color

and are characteristic of rocks that geologists refer to as "mafic" rocks. Perhaps it is the white lichens growing on them?

Whatever the case, there is a very strange landscape feature up here. The ground is quite hummocky, but the hummocks are very small in size and they cover an area several acres in extent. Here's what they look like in a broad view: they resemble a mogul field at a ski resort except that the land is relatively flat. There also didn't appear to be any particular pattern to their arrangement.

Here's what they look like with me for scale.

My guess is that each hummock is underlain by a boulder as on the top of White Tor, but each boulder has been overgrown by moorland vegetation. No matter the explanation, this was a different landscape than we had ever walked through.

We finished up the moorland and tor portion of our tour by visiting The Langstone, a Bronze Age standing stone that is the last in a long line of standing stones,

before descending out of the moor and into the valley of the River Tavy at Hill Bridge. Our guide book describes the river as being "impetuous" and we found this rather amusing.

The River Tavy is a salmon river and a weir at the bridge also includes a salmon ladder.

We passed over several interesting stiles on the way, some ascending over the stone hedges with steps built into the sides of the walls,

here you can see how steep these crossings are,

and some resembling fence crossings that you would see along the Appalachian Trail.

We left Hill Bridge and continued along a path that followed a course along a leat, which is a common term in this part of Great Britain for an aqueduct. There are leats all over Dartmoor, including Drake's Leat, which was built in the 1500s to supply water to Plymouth. The River Tavy descends rapidly in elevation here (off to the left in the picture below), but the leat and the path contour along the top of the valley, making for a lovely walk. This area reminded Christine and I of western North Carolina, with plenty of moss, ferns, mountain streams, and topography.

The path eventually leads to Creason Wood (http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/en/our-woods/Pages/wood-details.aspx?wood=4342),

which is a Woodland Trust property that Christine and I found to be particularly lovely. We are planning to bring the girls here on a nice spring or summer day.

From here on, our tour led us through villages and what our guidebook described as a "steeplechase." It was quite a contrast to go from the bleak moor to lovely villages with old churches and pubs. We passed through the hamlet of Horndon before reaching the Elephant's Nest Inn (http://www.elephantsnest.co.uk/) on the outskirts of the village of Mary Tavy, where we had a nice lunch and our first sample of Jail Ale (http://www.dartmoorbrewery.co.uk/jailale.htm), brewed within the boundaries of Dartmoor National Park.

With our typical time constraint now beginning to affect our field trip (the girls dismissal time of 3:10 and our need to finish the hike and drive to Harrowbarrow!), we did the last three miles of the hike at top speed. Fortunately, unlike the first two miles of the walk the topography was relatively level until the last bit, and we were able to see the steeples of the "steeplechase." We started with an old mining chimney, not a steeple, really, but a symbol of the region as iconic as any of the church steeples. 

The path led through the grounds of the Mary Tavy church,

and on to the village of Peter Tavy and its similar, if not larger, church.

While in Peter Tavy we saw the 15th century Peter Tavy Inn (http://www.petertavyinn.com/), also a pub that we'd like to lunch at in the future. The food must be good here, too, because the place was packed. You may have noticed that pubs in England have a chip on their shoulder regarding their age. A label of "14th century pub" or "15th century pub" is a badge of honour. We see that on our local Carpenter's Arms pub. A younger pub can still sound cool if it can be labelled "Victorian" or "Georgian" pub. Somehow, a label like "1950s pub" just wouldn't cut it. 

From here we had an uphill climb to the carpark, but it was aided by the lovely placement of the trail along a mountain stream,

a plethora of daffodils ("daffs" to the locals; Christine gives me a big eye roll for calling them that! - more about daffs in an upcoming post),

and our last uphill climb to the carpark.

This was definitely a good field trip excursion, if not only for rocks but also for the hydrology, including the leat and salmon stair features. Throughout the hike we could see, in the distance, what appeared to be a castle on a steep hilltop. It looked intriguing, sort of a miniature Edinburgh-Royal Mile-type structure. We have since found out from friends at Harrowbarrow School that it is Brent Tor. It has an old church at the top, the Church of St. Michael, and the geology of the site is quite interesting: it is an old, paleozoic volcano, complete with pillow basalts (lava extruded under water) at its base. Our guess of a miniature Edinburgh was not far off. This definitely sounds field trip-worthy and it may be the focus of our next field excursion.