Hidden Landscapes: Prehistoric Dartmoor

This is Dartmoor, the largest surviving prehistoric landscape in north-western Europe. It's absolutely wonderful and a great place to visit, but 5,000 years ago it was completely forested. And it's actually humans that came here and farmed and cleared all the landscape of trees. What appears to be a natural wildscape is actually a human creation. But that's been great for archaeologists because the landscape is stuffed full of prehistoric monuments. And they only survive because agriculture hasn't swept them away. We have field systems, houses, there are enclosures, there are ritual monuments like stone rows and stone circles. There's so much to explore. Many of these are hidden, but we're going to try and show you some of them. When you think of prehistory, you tend to think of stone circles or maybe stone rows. And there are dozens of stone rows on Dartmoor and some stone circles. And here at Merivale, we've got the whole range. These date to about 5,000 years ago, the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age, about the time of Stonehenge. So we've got a double stone row right next to me here, another one a little bit further over. There's a stone circle here, there are standing stones, there are burial chambers, what we call kists. And there's even a single stone row here as well. We have here a whole ritual landscape. Now ritual sometimes means we don't know what it was, and that is true here. We don't know how it was used. What we do know, though, is that it's a place where lots of people would have come to. Just to construct it takes quite a lot of effort. And presumably they're coming here for communal activities. But the thing about the stone rows is that they really make you walk in a straight line. They are guiding processions. But all to do with ceremonies of life, rites of passage, all those important dates in your diary, your lifetime and the lifetime of a community. Reconstructing daily life 3,000 years ago is really difficult for archaeologists. This site, Grimspound, comprises about 24 houses encircled by a massive stone bank. It's a few metres thick. It makes it a very unusual site for Dartmoor because many of the sites are much smaller boundaries. The houses tend to be bigger. But this site has got such a big wall around it, it is extra special and quite unusual. So we can describe it as a village, but maybe just a village because it's here on the open moor that they use seasonally. Perhaps this is just somewhere they came up in the summer to manage their flocks from out on the open moorland. And then come the winter, they would be living further down in the lowlands where it's a bit more comfortable. Much of the site has been altered, particularly in Victorian times when early archaeologists, antiquarians, came here to excavate. And they excavated some of what they called hut circles. We prefer to call them roundhouses, but they reconstructed the houses probably rather artificially and with a lot of Victorian imagination. Eventually, it came to be known as Grimspound because in the medieval period, they used this as a pound to impound stock or cattle or sheep that found wandering on the moor. And they must have called it Grimspound possibly because they associated it with the ancient god Grim or Woden. And maybe they thought that it's such a big enclosure, such big walls, that it must have been built by some deity. Here in the Upper Plymouth Valley, we have 15.5 square kilometres of English heritage site. In fact, there are 300 sites within it, medieval and prehistoric. And the prehistoric settlements here are actually much more typical than Grimspound. This is where farming communities were living, looking after cattle, sheep. And they were living in these closed communities within these enclosures. Each one of these enclosures was probably an extended family. And these substantial roundhouses stood sometimes for hundreds of years. Imagine these great big timber roofs and the thatch on the top. But there you have to imagine the whole family, men, women, children, huddled around the fire in the evenings. The fire would be going all day and the whole house would have been filled with smoke. The great thing about the Upper Plymouth Valley is there is so much to see. It's best actually seen from the air. But if you go down on the ground and you start to tune in, you start seeing these roundhouses and the enclosures. And then you can start building up that picture in your mind's eye of these actual communities living here. Dartmoor is just such a fantastic landscape to explore. Every time you come, you find more in this hidden landscape and you start to tune in to those buildings. And where else can you sit inside a 3,000 year old roundhouse and picture the lives of the people that lived here as farming communities all that long time ago.