Description: Walking the prehistoric archaeology of Dartmoor. Listings of all the Neolithic and Bronze Age sites such as stone circles, rows, cists and cairns
cairns (238) bronze age (26) stone circles (22) stone rows (3) belstone (3) dartmoor walks (2) merrivale (2) cists (1) drizzlecombe (1) soussons circle (1)
Dartmoor has a particularly rich abundance of settlements, monuments and ritual sites dating from prehistoric times. The mild hospitable climate of the Bronze Age deteriorated after a few thousand years leaving these areas uninhabited and consequently relatively undisturbed to the present day. There are many great guides to walking on Dartmoor, many include descriptions of these sites, but it is difficult to find guides specifically for those wanting to visit these sites. The Dartmoor Walks website suggests
The first humans came out of Africa 2 million years ago. Around 1 million years ago Britain was connected to the continent and the first humans arrived in Britain. Flint tools found recently in Norfolk show that there were humans there around 900,000 years ago 1 . These early humans were not Homo sapiens but of the same genus Homo. These hunter-gathers came and went with the successive ice ages during the Palaeolithic period. During the ice ages the region became unpopulated. During successive inter-glacial
The early Stone Age hunter-gather period, the Palaeolithic, encompasses around 99% of human history. It gave way after the last ice age, around 12 thousand years ago, to a gradual move towards farming - the Mesolithic or middle stone age period. Britain would have been uninhabited again during a further cold period known as the Loch Lomond Stadial which ended around 10,000 years ago 4 . This is a hunter-gather period when the uplands were used as seasonal hunting grounds.