Enjoy Dartmoor’s wild expanses, appreciate its special flora & fauna, explore remote prehistoric sites or learn to navigate with moorland guide Geri Skeens. Choose from a range of public events or book a bespoke day tailored just for you.
Events and Guide Hire 2024
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Nature Events
Dartmoor offers blanket bog, heath, tumbling streams and magical woodlands. Explore any or all of these habitats and their varied flora & fauna.
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Guide Hire
For a walk or activity tailored to your interests and needs, book a bespoke day or half-day for yourself, your family, or group.
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Navigation Training
Develop map and compass skills to safely get out on the hills with bespoke training for beginners, improvers and families. Pre-assessment coaching for mountain leaders.
Exploring Dartmoor
The landscape
Nowhere else in Southern England can you find the wild, remote beauty of Dartmoor’s peaty heart: a vast expanse of blanket bog where you can walk all day without encountering another soul. The moors are punctuated by imposing granite outcrops and cut by fast flowing streams that, as they descend through heathy slopes – a riot of yellow gorse and purple heather in late summer – have carved great gorges lined with oak woodland; these are temperate rainforests where boulders are clothed with luxurious moss and every tree drips with lichen.
The wildlife
Dartmoor’s mosaic of inter-connected habitats supports a huge range of flora and fauna. Some are specialised such as insect-eating sundews, as seen on The Green Planet! Some are rare, such as Britain’s largest beetle. Dartmoor is a refuge for many species; indeed, as one walks along, the air full of the song of skylarks, a cuckoo calling, a riverbank adorned with otter spraint, dragonflies patrolling a mire, one has to remind oneself that these species are not common elsewhere.
The history
The high moors may look like a wilderness but people have hunted on Dartmoor since the Stone Age and settled and farmed in successive waves from the Bronze Age. The early people built granite circles and long stone rows and buried their dead in granite graves which survive to this day. The round houses and longhouses of the farmers who succeeded them abound, with many longhouses on the edges of Dartmoor still inhabited. People have mined tin and other minerals here for millenia too, leaving evidence of early tin streaming, medieval open cast mines and finally underground mining which continued into the 20th century.