Enclosure with hut circles and rectangular pens, south of Bala Brook

Reasons for Designation

Dartmoor is the largest expanse of open moorland in Southern Britain and because of exceptional conditions of preservation, it is also one of the most complete examples of an upland relict landscape in the whole country. The great wealth and diversity of archaeological remains provides direct evidence for human exploitation of the Moor from the early prehistoric period onwards. The well-preserved and often visible relationship between settlement sites, major land boundaries, trackways, ceremonial and funerary monuments as well as later industrial remains, gives significant insights into successive changes in the pattern of land use through time. The enclosure with hut circles and rectangular pens, south of Bala Brook is a well preserved example of its kind and provides important evidence of how early farming and stock-rearing communities lived on the Moor.

Details

Low stone walls or banks enclosing a circular floor area form the remains of timber and turf or thatch-roofed dwellings occupied by farmers of the prehistoric period. They may occur singly or in larger groups and were sometimes built within a surrounding boundary bank or enclosure. On Dartmoor, the long tradition of building stone-based round houses can be traced back to the second millennium BC, probably from about 1700 BC. This D-shaped enclosure, south of Bala Brook and downstream of its confluence with Red Brook, is approximately 0.75ha in area with Bala Brook forming the flat side, which is not enclosed. It has a massive wall over 3m in width and over 1m in height. The wall's make up includes very large granite boulders, and it has an entrance in its southern side. Attached to the southern wall within the enclosure are five rectangular pens roughly 9.5m by 10m in width and length. Their walls have been rebuilt in places to a height of over a metre, with entrances facing into the enclosure. There are also at least seven hut circles, three cut off from the rest by the Water Board intake fence, they are up to 10m in diameter and their walls are up to 0.5m in height. Some of them retain evidence of entrances on their south-eastern sides.

MAP EXTRACT The site of the monument is shown on the attached map extract. It includes a 2 metre boundary around the archaeological features, considered to be essential for the monument's support and preservation.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

10578

Legacy System:

RSM

Sources

Other
Devon County SMR SX66SE-090,

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