Princetown

Pubs, Breakfasts and Trailhead Stops

The Prince of Wales on Tavistock Road pours a beer called Jail Ale, and it is not straining for the name. Dartmoor Brewery started in humble premises behind this pub in 1994, when a brewer called Simon Loveless set up with a local partner, and the flagship ale has always been brewed within 800 metres of Dartmoor Prison. The brewery has since moved to a purpose-built site nearby — at 1,465 feet it is the highest brewery in England — but the Prince of Wales remains its tap, and still pours Jail Ale, Legend and Dartmoor IPA alongside a long list of other things. The actual Prince of Wales, the future one, turned up in 1996 to try a pint of it. The kitchen does a Steak and Jail Ale Pie that one reviewer called the best pie he had ever had, "absolutely rammed with steak," a mixed grill that arrives under a heap of onion rings and chips, and a Wexford steak off the specials board with a Stilton sauce. It is dog-friendly throughout, and keeps a supply of snacks behind the bar to keep the dogs happy, which tells you most of what you need to know about who walks in.

Up the road is the Plume of Feathers, the oldest building in Princetown — built around 1785, a couple of decades before the prison, and licensed as a coaching inn for travellers to and from Plymouth. It closed after Covid and stood shut for two years before Steve Bellman took it on in 2023, put £100,000 into the kitchen, and reopened it in phases. It stands in eight acres with a camping field of seventy-five tent pitches and a touring field for motorhomes; a pitch including one adult is £15, and there are no barbecues, because Dartmoor is one dropped ember away from disaster and the pub's website says so in plain terms. There is free live music on Saturday nights, an open mic the last Thursday of the month, and a quiz the third Friday with £1 entry and the winner taking the lot. It is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, which on high moorland in winter is a reasonable position to take.

For daytime the anchor is the Fox Tor Café on Two Bridges Road, run by a man named Derek whom the reviews mention more often than the food. It does all-day breakfasts, home-cooked local food, and a cream tea that people rate for getting the ratio of clotted cream to jam correct, which is the sort of thing that starts arguments in Devon. There is a vegan cream tea too, and a gluten- and wheat-free menu, which makes it a rare plant-friendly stop up here. Dogs come in muddy paws and all. The café is the base for Princetown Cycle Hire, has a bunkhouse sleeping twelve that fills with Duke of Edinburgh and Ten Tors groups, and closes on Tuesdays.

Makers, Visitor Information and the Railway Track

The village punches above its size for a place with 1,443 people. Dewerstone, a Dartmoor-born outdoor clothing brand founded in 2013 and a certified B Corp, has its flagship store opposite the visitor centre, and it doubles as a coffee shop doing brownies and expertly brewed coffee — walkers plan routes over a cup before setting off. In the Duchy Square Centre, an arts hub of seventeen small workshops and a gallery, you will find Happy Belly Bakery, run by Zelah and her husband Michael. They both live with IBS and credit fermented food with changing their lives, which is why the sourdough rises slowly over four days for the crackle you can hear when you tear a loaf apart. Their first kitchen, back in Tavistock, came with a cat called Mabel who silently judged them. They make focaccia and swirl buns as well as loaves, and they are closed Sunday through Tuesday.

The old Duchy Hotel — where Arthur Conan Doyle stayed in 1901 — has just changed hands again. It served as the National Park Visitor Centre until October 2025, and in mid-July 2026 the Duchy of Cornwall reopened it as Gather & Moor, a combined visitor-information point, café and retail space, with a "Meet the Maker" corner giving local craftspeople free rotating room to show and sell. The café does simple wholesome food from Dartmoor and Devon suppliers. It is a month old at the time of writing, so treat it as still settling in. Everyday needs are covered by the Londis post office and store, open seven days from seven to seven.

The walking is the reason most people come, and the best of it leaves from the village car park at PL20 6SS. The former Princetown railway — the highest line in England, opened 1883 and closed in 1956 — is now a level trackbed forming part of the Dartmoor Way, and it carries you west out of the village on an easy gradient toward Foggintor Quarry, where the granite that built Nelson's Column was cut and the workings are now a flooded lake ringed by ruins. From there you can climb King's Tor for wide moorland views, a circuit of about 5.6 miles. Neighbouring Swelltor quarried the stone for London Bridge, and about a dozen dressed granite corbels, each some three metres long, still lie beside the old siding — cut to widen the bridge in the early 1900s and then simply never shipped, left where they were made. Above the village rises North Hessary Tor, topped by a 196-metre BBC transmitting mast put up in 1955, which is either an eyesore or a navigation aid depending on the weather; walkers use it to find their way from miles off. South-west, the Devonport Leat gives long flat walking beside a slow man-made channel of moor water. And the Jobber's Road runs two and a half miles out to Nun's Cross, a medieval granite boundary marker also known as Siward's Cross.

Moorland Weather and Prison Origins

Round it all sits the moor itself. Princetown is the highest settlement on Dartmoor, roughly 1,430 feet up, colder and wetter than the rest of Devon, with getting on for two metres of rain a year. Cherry and Pevsner, in the Buildings of England, called it "unquestionably the bleakest place in Devon — not only because of the jail." To the south lies Fox Tor Mires, a 370-acre bog that Conan Doyle turned into the Grimpen Mire, the one that swallows the moor pony in *The Hound of the Baskervilles*. He and his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson worked the novel up while staying at the Duchy Hotel; the moor did the rest.

The prison is why any of this is here at all. In 1785 Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, secretary to the Prince of Wales, leased this open moorland from the Duchy of Cornwall to reclaim it as farmland, built himself a house at Tor Royal, and named the settlement after his patron. The farming never really took, but the prison did: built from 1806 at a cost of £130,000 to hold French prisoners from the Napoleonic wars, it took its first inmates in 1809 and later held American sailors from the War of 1812 — up to nine thousand men at its peak. When the wars ended in 1816 the prison closed and the town nearly died with it. It reopened as a convict prison in 1851 and remains a working prison today.

A Church and Museum Shaped by Captivity

The church tells the same story in stone. St Michael and All Angels, built between 1810 and 1814, is the only church in England built by prisoners of war — French and American captives raised it under the prison's shadow. It is Grade II*, redundant now and cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, plain inside and out, with a pulpit brought from St Sidwell's in Exeter and an east window of 1910 by Mayer of Munich commemorating the Americans who helped build it. Three flags hang in the chancel — American, French, and a British ensign — and the churchyard holds around 1,200 graves, split roughly evenly between prisoners and locals, the prisoners' stones set in neat rows northwest of the tower. Not far from those rows, on 6 April 1815, months after the war had officially ended and with the men still not released, guards under Captain Thomas Shortland fired into a crowd of American prisoners and killed seven. They lie in the prisoners' cemetery behind the jail.

You can walk into a good deal of this history at the Dartmoor Prison Museum, in the old prison dairy — £5 for adults, card only, dogs allowed, with a cast of former residents that runs from Frank Mitchell, the Mad Axeman, to John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer. At the visitor centre children can dress up as Sherlock Holmes or as a prison inmate, which are the two available career paths on Dartmoor. For something gentler there is letterboxing, the moor's own treasure-hunt, begun in 1854 when a Chagford guide left a bottle for visitors' cards at Cranmere Pool; there are now several thousand hidden across the moor.

Getting Here and Princetown Warmth

Getting here means the B3212, which crosses bare treeless moor from Yelverton at one end and Two Bridges at the other; Tavistock is eight miles, Plymouth about fourteen, and there has been no station since the line closed in 1956. Bus 98, now run by Oakleys Coaches, connects the village to Tavistock and Yelverton a handful of times a day. Once you are up here, though, everything worth seeing is close: Two Bridges and the stunted moss-hung oaks of Wistman's Wood a couple of miles north, the Bronze Age stone rows at Merrivale three miles west, the clapper bridge at Postbridge six miles on.

The bakery's tagline is "kneaded with love, risen with care, shared with joy," which is a lot of warmth for a place where the wind can take the door off your hand. But that is Princetown: the bleakest spot in Devon, and somewhere in it a cat once sat judging two people as they learned to make bread.