Two Bridges

Gideon and the crossroads

Gideon the goose lived on the lawns of the Two Bridges Hotel and had a small part in Steven Spielberg's War Horse. He was killed by a dog in November 2019. The hotel is known for feeding the tame wildlife that gathers where its gardens run down to the West Dart, and Gideon was the best-known of them.

The hotel is more or less all there is at Two Bridges. This is a crossroads rather than a village — the point where the B3212 and the B3357 cross, with open moor in every direction and the West Dart just below its meeting with the Cowsic. There are no shops. The nearest post office and supplies are at Princetown, about a mile and a half up the road.

Food and a dog-friendly welcome

That leaves you eating at the hotel, which is no hardship. The restaurant holds two AA Rosettes and a Taste of the West Gold Award, and cooks from Dartmoor farmers, fishermen and producers. There's a Devon cream tea served in the lounge or the gardens, a three-course Sunday lunch, and evening dinners the kitchen files under hearty Dartmoor favourites. The bar pours Dartmoor Brewery ales, including Jail Ale, brewed up the road at Princetown at England's highest brewery.

Dogs do well here. They're welcome everywhere except the restaurant, where a table in the bar can be arranged instead, and most bedrooms come with a gift pack of bowl, toys and treats. Given what happened to Gideon, the leads matter.

The coaching inn and its bridges

The building went up in 1794 as a coaching inn called the Saracen's Head, reputedly set up by Sir Francis Buller of nearby Prince Hall and named for his family crest. It took the name Two Bridges in the early 1900s. The two bridges themselves are a bit of a swindle: a 1765 map shows the road once crossing both the West Dart and the Cowsic on separate bridges, but by 1891 only one remained. The pair you see today — a Victorian bridge and the Prince Edward road bridge, finished in 1932 — get mistaken for the originals.

The walking is the reason to be here. From the car park a signed route heads north up the West Dart valley to Wistman's Wood, one of Britain's few high-altitude temperate rainforests, a mile of stunted, lichen-hung oaks that Britain Express describes as "a tangle of gnarled and twisted oak trees." The full circular via Crockern Tor is about five miles and takes a couple of hours.

Crockern Tor and the Hairy Hands

Crockern Tor, immediately above the crossroads, was where the Devon Stannary Parliament — the tinners' assembly — met in the open air from the early 14th century. Sir Walter Raleigh presided over a court here on 27 October 1600.

The road east to Postbridge is the one to watch. The stretch of the B3212 between here and there is haunted, according to Dartmoor's most durable legend, by the Hairy Hands — disembodied hands that grab the wheel and shove vehicles off the road, blamed for crashes since around 1910.

Moorland travel and Gideon's lawn

There's no station on the moor; Plymouth and Exeter are your railheads, and the buses are the limited moorland sort. You'll want a car. Ponies graze the open moor all around, and the hotel's lawns still run down to the shallows where Gideon used to hold court.