 A well defined hut at Sharpitor looking northeast towards Leeden Tor. |
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Sharpitor
is a well know granite outcrop popular with visitors to Dartmoor as
it stands close to the B3212 road as it crosses the southwestern corner
of the moor. While the bare rock hill dominates the local landscape
and is popular with walkers and day trippers there are traces of prehistoric
activity on its slopes that go largely unnoticed by many tourists including
the stone rows and cairns on its northern
slopes and this small settlement to the northeast of the Tor. The collection
of eleven huts with their associated field system lie just 250 metres
from the summit of Sharpitor on gently northeastern sloping ground that
leads down to the pass between Sharpitor and Leeden Tor which now forms
the route of the modern road and it could well be that the road is built
over what was the course of an ancient trackway. The huts are mostly
circular but vary greatly in size from small 2 metres diameter examples
that may be the remains of storage areas to others like the one shown
above that have a diameter of over 8 metres which are likely to have
been the bases of habitation structures, i.e. Bronze Age houses. The
wooden posts that would have formed the walls and the turf or brush
covered roofs have of course long gone but the stone rings around the
base of the walls still remain and some still stand up to half a metre
tall, the picture at the bottom of the page showing a reconstruction
of a roundhouse at Flag Fen gives some impression
of what these houses might have looked like.
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 This hut is less well defined and could have been used for storage of meat or grain. View looking east towards Stanlake Plantation. |
 A reconstructed roundhouse at Flag Fen near Peterborough. |
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