Farming Past, Present & Future

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Written by Norman Cowling

Just up the road from our farm is a deserted medieval settlement which some of you will know, called Hutholes.  Thereon a small site are the clear stone outlines of half a dozen buildings, half of them dwellings, and the remainder small barns or stores.  

The National Park who manage the site have put up an information board with an artist's impression of Hutholes Man.  He is thought to have lived here in the 13th and 14th centuries - possibly a little earlier.  Hutholes Man is stocky, and hirsute.  He's whittling on a stick and tethered alongside him is a patient cow.  His house is not much bigger in floor area than one of the larger hut circles.  But it is rectangular and is clearly a transition towards the longhouse which will develop in the 15th and 16th centuries.  Between the man and his beast there is a small bonfire and the smoke is curling up through the turf roof.

To our modern tastes the life of Hutholes Man must have been nasty, short and brutish - little raised above the level of the beasts with whom he shared his house.  But in his time and locality Hutholes Man must have been a success.  Building 2 or more stone houses would have been the work of two or more generations, and the site was probably occupied for another 100 years after that.  

Wherever your eyes take you on the moor above 1000 feet you will see the clear signs of thousands of years of settled occupation, and settled agriculture

So Hutholes Man founded a dynasty, and has left clear evidence of his life and labours for all to see.  How many of us will leave such a legacy?

Hutholes is off the beaten track; a peaceful place like so many on Dartmoor, where one can sit and gaze out over the surrounding moor and hills.  Keith Bungay, a distinguished former National Park officer at Exmoor has described that moor as like an "open history book".  How much is that equally  true of Dartmoor?  Wherever your eyes take you on the moor above 1000 feet you will see the clear signs of thousands of years of settled occupation, and settled agriculture.

The reaves, the prehistoric field boundaries, march across the open moor in linked geometric systems, some of them running for miles.
Sometimes the prehistoric field boundaries line up with the field boundaries of today's in-bye land.  Not only is the moor an open history book, but today's farmers are literally following  in the footsteps of countless generations of their predecessors.

The moor's open history book also shows the observer the outline of a barrow, or burial chamber on the skyline.  Depending on the state of the vegetation one may pick out hut circles, standing stone rows, and walled pounds or enclosures.
 

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