FRIDAY-Dartmoor - Bellever Tor

We were up bright and early today with a delicious full english breakfast again; never get tired of that, and I got to have poached eggs today! YUMM!!!!!!

We went carefully over our Ordnance Survey Map for Dartmoor and set off for the tiny hamlet of Bellever to find our trailhead to hike to Bellever Tor. We picked a path that was a bit further, but with some less incline to it for most of the way. What I didn't realize was what a steep incline it would lead us to once we got the the base of the tor.

What's a tor you say? Generally speaking, it's a very great big hill (Bellever Tor is about 1300 feet high), quite steep, and there's a great outcropping of granite at the top. This granite often looks like it's something man-made, like an old fortress or an ancient monument, but the tors are all natural, and Dartmoor has the most tors in the world.




We made our way a little over a mile to get there, and then up the very steepest side of the tor. The smoother incline we could have used for our approach was not on the map, and it would have meant a bridle trail we found very easy going down, but which would have been a death march to go up.











The path to Bellever Tor was gorgeous with old dry stone walls, the characteristic moss that is everywhere in the wild here, and little streams and brooks running down from the tor itself. We found our way to one of the many old hut circles out here on the moors. These are the bronze age foundations (5000 BC) of stone walled huts that would have had thatched roofs and timber walls around the encampment. It was so incredible to stand in the middle of this old dwelling that our ancestors lived their lives in so long ago.










Not long after the stone hut, we turned the corner, made several steep climbs, and made it to the top. It was... incredible. Bellever Tor is a tor of special significance for incredible views in every direction. I was pretty spent getting up there, but I was so excited that I quickly mountain-goated my way up 20 feet of granite to the tippy top of the tor. (Even Jeri was impressed that I had any spring in my step at that point, let alone clambering up as ably as i did).







So amazing. I attempted to capture it in some pictures here and with a video i took here. It's hard to do it justice. I also can't adequately express how pleased I was to stand in this place that had been an abstraction on the map and an exciting place only in my imagination.







During our lunch on top of the tor (a nice wedge of double gloucester with crackers, beef jerky, and an aero bar) some of the wild ponies came by to visit. Ok, only some of them were wild. Some clearly had ear tags, but others were just wandering out on the moors like us.




As we made our way back, we passed a very large bronze age settlement at the base of the tor and were humbled to think that the path we were walking down from the top of the tor had been walked for thousands of years; we were just one more set of millions of feet that had crossed that way through the millennia. The sites on our hike were a pure joy and I felt so fortunate to be there. What a great day!!!