Bronze Age round houses beside a run of prehistoric stone rows and a tall standing stone on open moor west of Princetown
Open accessfree to visit at any reasonable time
Standing remainssubstantial fabric survives to stand in front of
A stone more than three metres tall stands apart from two long rows of smaller stones laid out east-west across the moor, the longer of the two running 263 metres. Both rows, along with a small circle of stones and a scatter of burial mounds called cairns, were built during the late Neolithic, roughly 3000 to 2300 BC. The round houses just to the north came later — farmers built more than 50 stone roundhouses here, some of them eight metres across, a few centuries after the stone rows went up. One large round stone near the rows looks prehistoric but isn’t — it’s a stone used for crushing apples in cider-making, centuries after the roundhouses were abandoned. Merrivale sits on open moor beside the B3357 west of Princetown, close to the Dartmoor Way, with little shelter, so dress for wind and wet underfoot even on a calm-looking day.
