Dartmoor is 368 square miles of open moorland at the heart of Devon, and it’s the walk that catches first-timers out fastest of anything in this collection. A little preparation goes a long way before the first visit.
A different kind of walking
Most of it is unfenced, with no waymarked route telling you where to turn, which takes some getting used to if you’re coming from a coast path. Grass tussocks give way to heather, then to bare granite where a tor breaks through the ground, there are more than 160 of them scattered across the park, some barely a scramble from the road, others reachable only by a longer walk across open ground.
Some of the ground is boggy too: the low-lying mires hold water long after rain has stopped elsewhere, and a dog who charges ahead can be knee-deep before either of you notices the ground has changed. Weather turns quickly up here as well. A clear morning at the car park doesn’t guarantee a clear afternoon on the tor, and cloud can drop over high ground fast enough to take the view, and your sense of direction, with it.
Ponies, livestock and the firing ranges
Sheep, cattle and Dartmoor’s wild ponies graze the open moor year-round, under grazing rights that go back centuries, and none of them are used to a dog bounding up at speed. Keep the lead on whenever stock is in view and give a wide berth rather than a confident stride past, cattle with calves will defend them, and a startled pony can move faster than most dogs expect.
The ponies look tame from a car window, and they’re not: feeding them, however tempting, teaches them to approach the next dog walker with less caution than this one showed.
Three areas of the moor, around Okehampton, Willsworthy and Merrivale, are also used as military firing ranges, and have been for well over a century. Red flags mark the boundaries when a range is in use, and the current firing programme is published in advance, worth checking before you set out if your route crosses any of the three. Outside the ranges, none of this applies, and the vast majority of the moor is unaffected.
Starting gently: Haytor and Bellever Forest
Haytor, on the eastern edge, is one of our favourite ways in for a first visit. A car park sits close enough that the tor is a fifteen-minute walk away on a clear, well-trodden path, with the option to extend the loop toward Saddle Tor if the dog still has energy left. It’s popular, which trades wilderness for reassurance: paths are obvious, other dogs are common, and turning back early doesn’t mean retracing miles of open moor.
For a gentler start still, Bellever Forest swaps open moor for marked trails through conifer plantation, with the East Dart River running alongside for a good stretch, useful if your dog needs something more familiar underfoot before the wide open stuff. Postbridge, a few minutes further on, adds a clapper bridge, a slab of granite laid across the river on stone piers, medieval in origin, plus flat riverside walking either side of it. Both make a better first outing than the high open moor, and both sit close enough to Haytor to combine into a longer day once the dog’s settled.
Something stranger: Wistman’s Wood
If you want something stranger than a straightforward walk, Wistman’s Wood sits a short walk from the car park at Two Bridges: a scrap of ancient oak woodland where the trees, some of them several hundred years old, grow barely taller than head height, twisted and thick with moss over ground too rocky and uneven for ponies or cattle to reach, which is largely why it’s survived at all. Local legend has it stalked by the Wisht Hounds, ghostly black dogs with red eyes, and it’s easy to believe once you’ve seen the place. Keep your own very real dog on the lead here too, since livestock still grazes the approach even if it can’t get into the wood itself.
What’s worth carrying
Water for the dog matters more here than on a coastal walk: streams look clean and mostly aren’t, given how much livestock grazes upstream, so carry enough for the whole route rather than relying on what you pass.
Phone signal is patchy across large parts of the moor, worse in the valleys than on the tors themselves, and mist can close in fast even on a clear morning, so bring a paper map or a downloaded offline route alongside a phone that might not have one. Layers matter more than they would on a beach walk too, the moor sits high enough that wind and temperature shift fast, even in summer.
A basic first-aid kit covers the ordinary cuts and thorns a dog picks up in heather and gorse, and a bright collar or coat earns its keep on the stretches of open moor with no tree line to break up the ground against a dog’s colouring.
Where to base yourself
Dartmoor sits inland from all of it, the coast on one side, the rest of Devon spreading out from its edges. A handful of the cottages we curate in the Devon collection sit close enough to reach the moor without a long drive first, which matters more here than on a single easy walk. Two or three visits, starting at Haytor or Bellever and building toward the open moor once the dog has a feel for the ground, go better than one ambitious day trying to cover all of it at once.
The River Dart itself rises up here on the moor and doesn’t stop until it reaches the sea, and for a gentler, water-based contrast to all this open ground, our guide to Dartmouth and the Dart estuary covers the other end of the same river.
