Wild & Ancient Dartmoor

Dartmoor is the last, and largest, remaining wilderness in southern England, a landscape steeped in history and culture, made famous by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles. It is astonishingly rich in wildlife – lush oak woodlands teeming with songbirds, rolling moorlands where the song of the skylark and the call of the cuckoo are still widely heard, high mire systems where dunlin breed, and fast flowing rivers where trout and dippers thrive.

Today it is one of our most popular national parks, yet Dartmoor owes its present appearance to millennia of human influence. Our tour shall venture beyond the picture-postcard image of ponies and cream teas to explore medieval villages and farms, ancient droves and track ways, and the abandoned industrial landscapes shaped by tin, lead and granite extraction.

At Yarner Wood National Nature Reserve we will look out for pied flycatchers, redstarts and wood warblers, and investigate the unique granite tramway once used to transport hewn granite blocks to the Teign Estuary to be shipped for construction around the world. A trip to the high moor will take us to eerie Wistman’s Wood, where lichens cling to the boughs of ancient oaks, and we will also walk amongst some of the flower-rich hay meadows still to be found here.

We will stay throughout at the three-star Two Bridges Hotel in the heart of Dartmoor National Park, perched on the banks of the West Dart River.

This tour will be led by Peter Exley, BSc, a conservationist and ornithologist who works for the RSPB. Peter lives on the edge of Dartmoor, and is a Board Member of the Moor than Meets the Eye project to restore the landscapes and support the communities of the Moor.