Upper Plym Valley

Some 300 Bronze Age and medieval sites, covering 15 1⁄2 square kilometres (6 square miles) of Dartmoor landscape.

Today the Upper Plym Valley is a typically treeless Dartmoor landscape, grazed by cattle, sheep and ponies. It is hard to imagine it 3,500 years ago dotted with settlements of neat round huts, with fields of crops growing near the river and herds of pasturing animals on the higher slopes; or, in medieval and later times, alive with the activity of rabbit farming and tin streaming.

The Upper Plym Valley has an extraordinary concentration of stone remains littered across an area of 15.5 square km (6 square miles), making it one of the richest archaeological landscapes of Dartmoor. The area extends from the source of the River Plym down to the china clay pits at Lee Moor, a distance of some 7km (4.5 miles).

The remarkable survival of so many sites is due largely to the lack of agricultural or industrial activity on the moor in modern times, which has meant that many of the prehistoric and later monuments have been left undisturbed.

Most of the remains belong either to the Bronze Age (about 2300–700 BC) or the Middle Ages. Some indication of the level of activity that once took place here was provided by an archaeological field survey undertaken between 2001 and 2002, when more than 300 monuments dating chiefly from these two periods were recorded.