Dartmoor Commons: Rights, Grazing and the Making of a Moorland Landscape

Cross Dartmoor by road and the moor looks like wilderness: open, unfenced, grazed by ponies that seem to belong to no one. It is nothing of the kind. Almost every acre of the high moor is owned, almost every pony has an owner, and the shape of the landscape, from the open grassland to the walls that stop at its edge, is the product of rights and customs that go back at least eight hundred years. The Dartmoor commons are a working social landscape, negotiated between owners, farmers and, more recently, conservationists. The tour crosses Dartmoor on the fifth afternoon of our small group tour of England’s villages, and knowing how the commons work makes the view from the coach window far more interesting.

What is a common?

A common is land owned by one person or body over which other people hold rights. That distinction is the key to everything on Dartmoor. The Dartmoor Commoners’ Council explains that common rights are usually attached to a particular farm, so that whoever farms the land holds the right. Under an old rule known as levancy and couchancy, a farm could put onto the common only as many animals as it could support through the winter on its own land. The owner of the common, meanwhile, usually keeps the sporting and mineral rights.

The rights themselves are a catalogue of what a moorland farm needed. Pasture is the right to graze. Turbary is the right to dig peat for fuel. Estovers is the right to take wood and bracken for repairs and bedding. Common in the soil is the right to take stone or gravel. There were also rights to fish and, in woodland, to turn pigs out for acorns. Apart from grazing, these rights were for the household’s own use, not for sale.

The scale is large. The Dartmoor National Park Authority records that about 37 per cent of the national park is common land, divided into 92 separate commons owned by around 54 owners. About 850 people are registered as commoners, though the 2023 independent review of Dartmoor estimated that fewer than one in five actively graze.

The Forest, the Duchy and the commons of Devon

At the centre of the moor lies the Forest of Dartmoor, some 11,000 hectares. “Forest” here is a legal term for a royal hunting ground, not a wood. It has belonged since 1337 to the Duchy of Cornwall, created that year by Edward III for his son, the Black Prince, and the Duchy still owns around 67,500 acres on Dartmoor, much of it common land. Around the Forest lie the Commons of Devon and the commons of the surrounding manors.

Farmers on the edge of the moor gained their access to the Forest through an arrangement called venville. The Commoners’ Council explains that the name comes from fines villarum, the dues paid by the surrounding farms and villages. Farmers in 23 parishes around the moor were “in venville” and could pay the Duchy a small fee to graze animals on the Forest by day. Some were still paying these dues in the 1970s.

Inside the Forest itself were the ancient tenements, farms established in the sheltered valleys of the high moor in the Middle Ages, some recorded as early as 1260. Their tenants enjoyed special rights, including, according to local history sources, the right of an heir to enclose a few acres of new land from the moor, known as a newtake. Several of these farms are still worked today, their walled fields making green islands in the open moorland. The houses of such farms often took the form of longhouses, sheltering family and cattle under one roof, which our article on the longhouses of moorland Devon explores.

Is Dartmoor’s landscape older than the commons?

Much older. Across large parts of the moor run reaves, long, low banks of stone that divided the land into territories and fields. The National Park Authority dates them to the Middle Bronze Age, around 1700 to 1200 BC, after which they were largely abandoned. Historic England describes the Dartmeet system as covering more than 3,000 hectares, the best-preserved such field system on Dartmoor, and notes that some reaves run for kilometres. In places, traces of them survive inside later dry-stone walls.

The reaves are a reminder that the open moor was once farmed far more intensively than it is today, and that dividing up the land is a very old habit here. The later commons were laid over a landscape that had already been organised, abandoned and reorganised many times.

Grazing through the seasons

The commons were managed around the farming year. Until the mid-1920s, the Commoners’ Council records, cattle, many from the farms of the South Hams, were driven up to the moor in May and brought back down in October. Each farmer’s animals learned to graze their own unfenced patch of the common, known as a heaf or lear, and passed that knowledge on to their young.

The most visible survival of this system is the pony drift. Each autumn the ponies are gathered from the open moor into a pound, and each owner takes back their own. Foals born that spring are weaned, and some are sold at the markets in Tavistock and Chagford while others are kept to breed on the commons. The National Park Authority is clear that the ponies are not wild: every one belongs to a farmer. Their numbers have fallen sharply, from around 30,000 in 1950 to perhaps 1,500 today, according to the moor’s tourism body. Sheep, including Scottish Blackface and Whiteface Dartmoor, and cattle such as Galloways and South Devons graze the commons too.

Enclosure pressure, tin and the improvers

The commons survived because they were defended, but they were always under pressure. In the Middle Ages, tin was the great prize. The National Park Authority describes how tin working was overseen by the stannary towns of Tavistock, Chagford, Ashburton and Plympton, and how tin streaming left large scars on the moor that are still visible today.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought a different threat: the improvers, landowners who believed the moor could be made productive by enclosing and cultivating it. The best known was Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, who began building his house at Tor Royal in 1785 and set out to exploit Dartmoor’s minerals, granite and farmland. To provide labour, he founded the prisoner-of-war barracks at Princetown in 1806, which became Dartmoor Prison. Large new enclosures were walled off in this period, and the word “newtake” came to describe them too. Their long, straight walls remain, cutting across the older pattern of small valley fields.

The Dartmoor Commons Act and the modern moor

Dartmoor became a national park on 30 October 1951. The commons themselves were given a modern legal framework by the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985, which took eleven years to pass. The National Park Authority describes its two parts: the creation of the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council to regulate grazing, and a legal right of public access on foot and on horseback for open-air recreation. The council, made up mainly of members elected by the commoners themselves, can set rules to prevent overstocking, appoint reeves to enforce them, and keep the register of commoners and animals.

The balance between grazing and nature is still argued over. In December 2023 an independent review of protected site management on Dartmoor, chaired by David Fursdon, found that only a small fraction of the moor’s protected sites were in favourable condition. It identified a cycle of both over-grazing and under-grazing, and recommended re-wetting peat, supporting more cattle grazing and rebuilding trust between commoners and Natural England. The government accepted most of its findings in 2024. The commons, in other words, are not a relic; they are still being negotiated.

Village and moor: how to see a managed landscape

The villages around Dartmoor grew up in a relationship with the moor above them. Farms in the valleys depended on the commons for summer grazing, fuel and stone; the commons depended on those farms to graze and manage them. Look for that relationship as you cross the moor. Walled fields climb out of the valleys and stop at a hard line where the open common begins. Long, straight walls mark later enclosures. Gates and cattle grids mark the edge of the common on the roads. Ponies, sheep and cattle on the open moor are a sign that the old rights are still exercised.

Walls tell the story of land use in other upland regions too. Later on the tour, in the Yorkshire Dales, a quite different system of walled fields and field barns records another way of farming the hills, explored in our article on Yorkshire’s dry-stone walls. For a broader introduction to the moor’s history and character, see our guide to Dartmoor.

Does the tour stop on Dartmoor?

Dartmoor is seen from the coach on the afternoon of the fifth day, as the group drives from Lacock to Fowey in Cornwall. The tour page describes the moor as a fascinating landscape of tiny villages, farms, rolling hills and granite tors. It is a scenic crossing rather than a walking day, which makes it an easy introduction for travellers who prefer to save their energy for the Cornish villages that follow.

Seen with a little background, the drive across Dartmoor becomes a lesson in how rural England was shared out. Our guide to the England’s villages itinerary places it among the tour’s other landscapes of ownership and work, and the England’s villages small group tour is a fine way to see it with someone who can explain what lies beyond the window.