Qualla: Grimspound

Grimspound: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Midnightblueowl, CC BY-SA 3.0. Three thousand three hundred years ago, on a Devon hillside between two granite tors, a community built twenty-four stone houses and a wall to enclose them. Then they left. The wall stayed. The houses stayed. The acidic peat of Dartmoor dissolved their wood, their leather, their textiles, and most of their pottery, but it could not dissolve the granite. When the Reverend Richard Polwhele first recorded the site in 1797 he assumed it was a Druid temple. He was wrong by about a thousand years and an entire religion. The Saxons, finding it long abandoned, had named it for their god of war - Grim, more commonly known as Woden, or Odin. Grimspound. The pound of Grim.

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Image: Midnightblueowl | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grimspound: What They Built

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit yvette ansell, CC BY-SA 2.0. Around 1300 BC, late in the Bronze Age, builders raised a perimeter wall of granite enclosing roughly 1.45 hectares of hillside in the valley between Hameldown Tor and Hookney Tor. The wall is massive - in places its rubble is fifteen feet thick - and once stood perhaps 1.7 metre...

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Image: yvette ansell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Grimspound: The Victorians Dig In

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1893 the Dartmoor Exploration Committee arrived with shovels. Among them was the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, who would later write "Onward, Christian Soldiers." The Committee located the entrance, removed topsoil, sieved hearth ash for charcoal and seeds, and excavated a ser...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grimspound: Hearths and Daises

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brian Snelson from Hockley, Essex, England, CC BY 2.0. Inside the huts, hearths sat either at the centre or opposite the door. Ash analysis revealed oak and willow twigs - and peat. The presence of peat ash matters: by 1300 BC the Dartmoor forests had already retreated far enough that the inhabitants were burning the dried bog. The p...

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Image: Brian Snelson from Hockley, Essex, England | CC BY 2.0

Grimspound: What the Soil Took

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Midnightblueowl at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Dartmoor's soil is acidic enough to destroy almost everything organic. Wood, leather, textiles, bone, seeds, fingernails - all gone. What survives is the granite and the negative spaces it leaves: hut floors, hearth pits, post holes, the rubble of collapsed walls. A flint arrowhe...

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Image: Midnightblueowl at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Grimspound: Still There

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Grimspound was declared a scheduled monument in 1928. In 1964 Lady Aileen Fox, the eminent Dartmoor archaeologist, restored sections to prevent erosion. A 2019 geophysical survey by the University of Leicester and the Camborne School of Mines tried to map what still lies hidden i...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0