A clapper bridge crosses the East Dart at Bellever — flat granite slabs laid across the river on the line of the Lych Way, the old corpse road that carried the dead across the moor to Lydford for burial. You can stand on it now and watch children paddle in the shallows below, which is a gentler use for it.
Bellever is a cluster of farm buildings, forestry cottages and a youth hostel on the river, wrapped on three sides by Bellever Forest. There is no pub, no shop and no church. It was never a parish village — just a Duchy of Cornwall farm, first recorded in 1355 as "Welford," the spring by the ford. The Forestry Commission bought it in 1931 and planted conifers over most of it, and several of the houses went up in the 1950s for the men who worked the trees.
The forest is the reason to come. Waymarked trails run through it for walkers and off-road cyclists, there's a Forestry England car park and a seasonal visitor point, and the riverbank has picnic spots along the East Dart. It is one of the few genuinely wooded pockets in the middle of the high moor, which makes it a different kind of Dartmoor to the bare granite everywhere else.
Bellever Tor rises to the south-west, 443 metres of granite ringed by Bronze Age cairns. It's a short, steep climb from the forest edge and an easy first tor for children, with wide views across central Dartmoor once you're up.
Lakehead Hill, just north, holds stone rows, cairn circles, cists and the Kraps Rings hut settlement — a prehistoric complex so dense that the antiquarian John Page called Bellever "the Ancient Metropolis of the Moor" in 1895. Much of it was buried under the conifers for decades and is only now re-emerging as areas are felled. A 2011 dig exposed a Bronze Age roundhouse eight metres across with a paved granite floor.
For a pub you drive. The Warren House Inn is about ten minutes north on the B3212 — the highest inn in southern England at 1,425 feet, built to feed the tin miners of Golden Dagger and Vitifer. Its peat fire has reputedly burned without going out since 1845; when the hearth is cleaned the embers are carried to the second fireplace so the flame never dies. The kitchen does a home-made Warreners Pie, a rabbit feast that is the house signature, alongside steak and ale pie made with Dartmoor beef, and food runs all day from midday.
The stretch of the B3212 just north of here is where the Hairy Hands are meant to appear — disembodied hands that grab the wheel and force you off the road. The story gathered force in 1921, when the prison's medical officer was killed coming off his motorcycle nearby.
The barns of the old farm became a youth hostel in 1934, and it's still going — Devon's oldest working hostel, five minutes from the trees. The farm that raised Galloway cattle here is gone under the plantation, but the river keeps running under the clapper bridge, the way it did long before anyone thought to plant a tree.