Postbridge

The bridge that named the village

Three granite slabs lie flat across two squat stone piers over the East Dart, each slab over four metres long and weighing about eight tonnes. That is the clapper bridge, and it is the reason there is a village here at all. The slabs are locally called posts, which is where Postbridge got its name. Packhorses once carried tin across it to the stannary town of Tavistock, and it is thought to have been built in the thirteenth century, though the first firm record comes later. Two central piers, one with a pointed cutwater to split the river, three great grey slabs, and a total span of forty-two and a half feet. It is Grade II* listed and, by most accounts, the best-known ancient monument on Dartmoor. A modest Georgian road bridge stands a short way upstream, built in the 1780s when the Tavistock–Moretonhampstead road was turnpiked, and it is the one the traffic actually uses. Nobody photographs it.

Postbridge sits in the high central heart of Dartmoor on the B3212, roughly midway between Princetown and Moretonhampstead, on the East Dart River. The hamlet is a small cluster and knows it: a few houses, the village stores and Post Office, one inn, the National Park Visitor Centre, and then open moor, tors and forest in every direction. Bellever Forest rises directly across the road. Bronze Age hut circles, stone rows and burial mounds ring the place so thickly that Victorian writers took to calling it "the prehistoric metropolis of the moor," and the phrase has stuck.

The East Dart Inn stands in the middle of it all, close to the bridge and the visitor centre. John Webb, a tin miner and farmer, built it as a coaching inn in 1862. For a stretch of its life it was not a pub at all — Webb's son and his wife Lizzie turned it into a Temperance House, reportedly at Lizzie's urging against the demon drink, and it stayed dry until the 1950s. A new owner has since taken it in hand and renovated the whole thing, keeping the original oak settles, a hunting frieze along the walls and a log stove going in the bar. There are nine en-suite bedrooms upstairs, some of them dog-friendly, and the rear walled garden was once the stabling for the carriage horses.

Two inns and the village provisions

The kitchen runs to fish and chips, burgers, chilli con carne, jacket potatoes, baguettes and pizza, with a specials board and Sunday roasts served noon to four, booking advised. Breakfast is 9:30 to noon and needs pre-booking. During the day there is a vintage tea room turning out home-made cakes and scones on traditional crockery. Vegetarian and gluten-free are catered for, ingredients are sourced locally, and the beer is properly of the moor: Dartmoor Brewery's Jail Ale, IPA and Legend on hand pump, brewed ten minutes up the road at Princetown, which is England's highest brewery. Dogs get treats at the bar. The inn opens from four on Wednesdays and from eleven Thursday to Sunday, and one recent visitor summed up the refit as cleverly and tastefully done, which is about right.

Two miles up the B3212 toward Moretonhampstead is the other pub, and it is a different proposition entirely. The Warren House Inn is the highest inn in southern England, at 1,425 feet, and it has no mains electricity. In 1963 it was cut off from the world for twelve weeks by snow. Peter and Janet Parsons have run it since the eighties, under a lease from the Duchy of Cornwall. In one of its two fireplaces a peat fire is said to have burned without going out since 1845 — when the pub moved across the road that year, the smouldering embers were carried over by shovel, and when the chimney is swept the fire is simply shifted to the other hearth so the flame never dies. Whether that is strictly true is a question the inn is happy to leave open.

The food matches the setting. The signature is the Warreners Pie, a rabbit pie made to the house recipe — they cook fresh rabbits, pick the meat off the bones and top it with shortcrust, a nod to the rabbit warren that gave the inn its name. Beyond it there is steak pie in rich ale gravy, a traditional homity pie of potato, cheese and cream, Dartmoor beef steaks, lamb shanks and the Ploughman's, then sticky toffee pudding, bread-and-butter pudding, crème brûlée and flapjack. The ales are regional — Exeter, Otter and Summerskills — and the house scrumpy is Countryman Cider from Milton Abbot, with Thatchers on pump. It rates around 4.6 across some 1,700 reviews, which for a pub with no electricity in the middle of nowhere is a considerable thing.

Powdermills and paths from the door

For everything else, the village stores and Post Office opposite the bridge sells provisions and walking supplies, and will do you an ice cream or a takeaway cream tea. Runnage Farm nearby keeps a small camp shop from April to October, run by Christine, with much of the essentials. That is the sum of the village's shopping, and it is enough.

The one deliberate outing is Powdermills Pottery, a mile and a half west toward Two Bridges, housed in the granite buildings of a disused gunpowder factory. The potter is Joss Hibbs, and the work is genuinely of the ground it stands on: clays quarried from the moor, glazes mixed from granite, ash and clay, pots thrown slowly on a momentum wheel and fired in a wood-fuelled kiln. There is a tea room too — Devonshire cream teas in summer, soup and cake in winter, the scones served with clotted cream from a Dartmoor dairy seven miles away and Devon strawberry jam. It opens weekends, half past ten to five, and Hibbs runs throwing courses through the year, from a two-day intensive at £175 to ninety-minute tasters.

The walking starts at the front door. Bellever Forest, straight across the road, gives the easiest option: a roughly three-mile circular of about an hour and a half, extendable up Bellever Tor at 443 metres for views in every direction. The forest holds Bronze Age roundhouses, stone rows and a burial cist, and a family "History Hunters" trail lets children collect symbols spanning four thousand years. Heritage Dartmoor ponies graze the enclosure opposite the village, kept there to protect the breeding purity of the authentic moorland stock. For something longer, follow the East Dart upstream about five miles there and back to a waterfall that is at its best after rain, or head two miles north to Grey Wethers, the only double stone circle on Dartmoor and the highest-altitude one on the moor. The National Park runs a car park charge in Bellever, card only, and you can hire a Tramper — an all-terrain mobility scooter — from the visitor centre to reach the moorland views.

Burial finds, gunpowder and carved saints

That visitor centre, renovated in 2020, is the wet-weather anchor and the best free hour in the village. It tells the story of the Whitehorse Hill cist, a Bronze Age stone burial box on the moor above Postbridge, dug up in 2011 because drying peat was about to collapse it — the first Dartmoor burial excavated in a hundred years. Inside was the cremated body of a young person, possibly female and aged between fifteen and twenty-five, wrapped in a bear-skin pelt, along with a woven bag, more than two hundred beads of shale, amber, clay and tin, two pairs of turned wooden studs, a worked flint and a braided armband of cow hair studded with tin. It dates to around 1700 BC. Replicas are on display, and children can dress as prehistoric settlers, build a Bronze Age house and earn a badge; sensory bags are loaned free for those who need them.

The gunpowder ruins by the pottery have their own history. George Frean, a Plymouth industrialist, built the Powder Mills factory in 1844 for about twelve thousand pounds, making powder from saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal for the tin mines and granite quarries. The buildings were spaced apart with flimsy roofs so that any blast would vent upward, and the surviving proving mortar — a small cannon that fired a sixty-eight-pound shot to test each batch by distance — still lies beside the road. It was not entirely safe work: two explosions in 1857 killed three men between them. The factory closed in 1897, undercut by dynamite.

The church, St Gabriel's, is a small granite building of 1869, the first ever designed by the architect Robert Medley Fulford. It began life as a village school before being formally dedicated as a church in 1934, which is why its churchyard has never held a single grave. The interior is the surprise. The whole of the carved woodwork is the work of Violet Pinwill, one of the Plymouth Arts-and-Crafts sisters who ran her ecclesiastical carving firm single-handed for half a century. Her pulpit is crowded with wildlife — rabbits and squirrels alongside, for no obvious reason, koala bears and penguins — and its base carries an underwater scene of seaweed and fish. The reredos was paid for by Elsie Douglass Pethybridge, a Plymouth heiress and widow who had settled in the village, and dedicated to her three brothers, two of whom died in the First World War.

Hairy Hands and the forest's final word

Two ghosts round the place off. From about 1910 drivers and cyclists on the B3212 between Postbridge and Two Bridges reported being wrenched off the road by an unseen force, and in 1924 a woman camping on the moor woke to a clasping pair of hairy hands at her caravan window — the detail that named the Hairy Hands, Dartmoor's best-known ghost story. And the moor around here is widely taken to be the model for Grimpen in The Hound of the Baskervilles: Conan Doyle researched it in 1901, driven about by a coachman named Harry Baskerville, whose surname he liked enough to borrow.

The forest itself, for all its dark permanence, is barely older than the pub. The conifer blocks across the road were planted by the Forestry Commission from the 1930s, over open moor and prehistoric enclosures, two of which were lost under the trees. On a still afternoon the ponies drift down through Bellever to the East Dart, where families paddle and skim stones off the clapper slabs, and the fire two miles up the road keeps burning, moved from one hearth to the other and back, on nothing more than the say-so that it always has.