Qualla: Haytor Granite Tramway

Haytor Granite Tramway: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Most railways have iron rails. The Haytor Granite Tramway, opened on 16 September 1820, had rails of granite. The blocks were four to eight feet long and roughly a foot square, shaped to guide flangeless iron wheels along a 10-mile descent of 1,300 vertical feet from Dartmoor down to the Stover Canal. The logic was beautiful in its circularity: the tramway was built out of the very material it was built to carry. Two centuries later, with the canal silted up, the quarries closed, the horses long dead, and the iron wheels gone for scrap - the granite rails remain. You can still walk on them. They cross fields, climb through Yarner Wood, and lie scattered in the front lawn of a hotel near Bovey Tracey, indestructible.

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Haytor Granite Tramway: Why Granite

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Totnesmartin, Public domain. In the 1820s Britain's growing cities had an insatiable appetite for granite - for public buildings, for embankments, for bridges. Cornwall produced it, and so did Dartmoor, but getting Dartmoor granite to market was an engineering problem. Reliable roads barely existed. Railways...

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Image: Totnesmartin | Public domain

Haytor Granite Tramway: How It Worked

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yewenyi (Brian Voon Yee Yap), CC BY-SA 3.0. The track was a close cousin of the iron plateway, where L-shaped plates guided wagon wheels along a line. Here the plates were cut granite, shaped with a guiding flange on the inner edge. Twelve flat-topped waggons with iron flangeless wheels ran in trains. Eighteen horses, walk...

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Image: Yewenyi (Brian Voon Yee Yap) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Haytor Granite Tramway: Where the Stone Went

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian Beaumont, CC BY-SA 2.0. Haytor granite became London Bridge. The bridge designed by John Rennie, opened in 1831, was largely faced with stone quarried at Haytor. When that bridge was sold and dismantled in 1968 and reassembled at Lake Havasu City, Arizona in 1971, the granite went with it - which means ...

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Image: Adrian Beaumont | CC BY-SA 2.0

Haytor Granite Tramway: The Templer Way

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Devon County Council now maintains the eighteen miles of the Templer Way as a public footpath and cycleway, retracing the tramway and canal route from Haytor down to Teignmouth. The best stretch of preserved granite track lies in Yarner Wood, where the rails curve through trees t...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain