Sheepstor

The Rajahs and the hamlet

In the north-eastern corner of St Leonard's churchyard, behind iron railings, are four graves belonging to the White Rajahs of Sarawak. Sir James Brooke, who ruled a slice of Borneo, bought the Burrator estate in 1858 and retired here around 1863. He and three of his successors are buried under Dartmoor granite, half a world from where they governed. Karen Maitland, writing for The History Girls, put it well: the tombs face "the most English of rural scenes with sheep grazing on the hillside." The second Rajah's tomb reputedly took eleven horses to haul up the hill.

That is a lot of story for a hamlet of 53 people. Sheepstor has no pub, no shop, and no playground. What it has is a granite church, a tor, and a reservoir, and for the sort of holiday where you walk all day and want a fire at the end of it, that turns out to be enough.

From Sheeps Tor to the Bronze Age moor

Sheeps Tor rises to 369 metres half a mile northeast, a classic viewpoint over Burrator Reservoir and west Dartmoor. Somewhere in its rocks is the Pixies' House, a cleft so tight an adult has to fight to crawl inside. John Elford, Royalist lord of nearby Longstone Manor, is said to have hidden here from Cromwell's men, fed in secret by sympathetic locals. His family's monuments are inside the church.

The Burrator Reservoir loop is the walk most people do — about 3.7 miles, an hour and a half, skirting the shore before climbing the tor and dropping back to the water. The reservoir dates from 1898, and its building drowned the old farms, lanes, and the ruins of Longstone Manor, which now sit at the water's edge. If you want more moor, the paths carry on to Down Tor's stone row and Drizzlecombe, which has three parallel rows of Bronze Age stones, a cairn called the Giant's Basin, and the tallest standing stone on Dartmoor.

Pubs beyond Sheepstor

For a drink you go to Meavy, a mile off, where the Royal Oak stands beside an 800-year-old split oak on the green. It pours Dartmoor Brewery ales and is, as far as anyone can establish, the only pub in England and Wales owned by a parish council. The Burrator Inn at Dousland, a former hunting lodge two miles the other way, does home-cooked country food and has rooms.

Granite, bells and Borneo

St Leonard's is fifteenth-century granite, Grade II* listed, its unbuttressed tower dragged straight off the moor with white elvan mullions from Roborough Down. One of the six bells, cast in 1769, is inscribed "I call the quick to church and the dead to grave." On the south wall hangs a Pua Kumbu, an Iban ceremonial blanket, gifted by the people of Sarawak in 1996. The Borneo connection has never quite let go.

Railway memories and War Horse

There is no railway. The Princetown line and its Burrator & Sheepstor Halt closed in 1956, and the trackbed is now a walking route; Plymouth, the nearest mainline, is about ten miles off down minor lanes, so you'll want a car. In 2010 the film crew for War Horse turned up, and the church tower appears in an aerial shot in the trailer. Then they left, and the sheep went back to grazing the hill.