Burrator is unusual in having two dams. The Burrator Dam at the southwestern end is the more massive of the pair, built across the Meavy at Burrator Gorge in concrete faced with cut granite blocks. The Sheepstor Dam at the southeastern end, built in 1894, is an earth embankment with a puddled clay core wall above ground level and a concrete cut-off below. The reason for two dams is geography. The reservoir occupies a natural basin between the Meavy valley and a separate hollow drained by the Sheepstor Brook, and rather than building one enormous structure across both, Sandeman's engineers chose to plug each outlet with the appropriate type of barrier. When the reservoir opened on 21 September 1898 it held 668 million gallons. The watershed feeding it stretched across 5,360 acres of Dartmoor moorland.

Plymouth kept growing, and by 1923 the city wanted more water. The solution was elegant rather than expensive: raise both dams by ten feet. Work began in December 1923 and lasted nearly five years. Engineers built a temporary suspension bridge near Burrator Dam to keep traffic flowing during construction. When it was complete, the reservoir's capacity had grown from 668 million gallons to 1,026 million, a 54% increase achieved without rebuilding from scratch. The official reopening was on 12 September 1928. The reservoir today covers about 150 acres at overflow level, its edges planted with conifers that turn the basin into a green-and-grey amphitheatre. Burrator remains an operational water source for Plymouth, now managed alongside its leisure functions by the South West Lakes Trust.

The reservoir's road follows the dam wall and threads through the conifer plantation, with frequent pull-offs where walkers and cyclists can leave their cars. Fishing here is for rainbow and brown trout, by permit from the Trust. In the right weather Burrator can feel almost Scandinavian, the granite-faced dam reflected in still water, but Dartmoor's mists move quickly across the southern moor, and the same view can vanish into grey within minutes. The villages of Sheepstor and Meavy lie nearby, each with their ancient parish churches. On the lower slopes you can find the ruined manor house of the Elfords on the shore, the family who married into the Coplestons of Tamerton Foliot and whose descendants eventually held the manor. The whole catchment is a working landscape, but it is also one of the most quietly beautiful corners of the southern moor.

The reservoir has had its turn in the cameras as well as the cameras of weekend visitors. In October 2011 it featured in the first episode of the second series of James May's Man Lab on BBC Two, when Oz Clarke and James May travelled along its edge while staging a mock escape from nearby HMP Dartmoor to the village of Meavy. The same year, Steven Spielberg used Burrator's slopes as a setting for his film War Horse, the adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's novel about a Devon farm boy and his horse caught up in the First World War. The film's Dartmoor scenes were partly shot here because the landscape, with its drystone walls and bracken-covered slopes rising to the granite tors, has changed remarkably little in a century. Burrator does what good water-supply reservoirs are supposed to do: it keeps Plymouth's taps running. It also happens to look magnificent doing it.