Chagford

An ancient settlement and Stannary town, Chagford lies in a beautiful setting between the pleasant wooded valley of the North Teign river and the stark grandeur of the high moor. In the centre of the town stands the former Market House, a charming ‘pepperpot’ building erected in 1862. Around the square are some old-style family shops providing interesting shopping, and scattered around the town are distinctive old thatched granite buildings, many dating from the 1500s.

St Michael’s Church, mostly 15th century, has an elaborate monument to Sir John Wyddon who died in 1575. But the church is better known because of the tragic death of one of his descendants here in October 1641. Mary Whiddon was shot by a jilted lover as she was leaving the church after being married, an incident that is said to have inspired
RD Blackmore’s Lorna Doone. Her tombstone bears the inscription, “Behold a Matron yet a Maid”. Her ghost is thought to haunt Whiddon Park Guest House - a young woman dressed in black appeared there on the morning of a wedding reception due to take place later that day.

The famous Dartmoor guide, James Perrot, lived in Chagford between 1854 and 1895, and is buried in St Michael’s churchyard. It was he who noted that some of the farms around Chagford had no wheeled vehicles as late as 1830. On the other hand, Perrot lived to see the town install electric street lighting in 1891 making Chagford one of the first communities west of London to possess this amenity.

It was Perrot also who began the curious practice of letterbox stamp collecting. He installed the first letterbox at Carnmere Pool near the heart of the moor so his Victorian clients could send postcards home, stamped to prove they had been there. Today, there are hundreds of such letterboxes scattered all over Dartmoor.

To the west of Chagford, an exceptionally pleasant lane leads upstream from Chagford Bridge through the wooded valley of the North Teign river. (For one-and-a-half miles of its length, this lane is joined by the Two Moors Way, the long-distance footpath that runs all the way from Ivybridge on the southern edge of Dartmoor to the Bristol Channel coast.) A rock beside the river known as the Holed Stone has a large round cavity. If you climb through this, local people assure you, a host of afflictions from rheumatism to infertility will be cured.

The land to the south of Chagford rises abruptly towards Kestor Rock and Shovel Down, the sites of impressive Bronze Age settlements and, a little further on, the imposing Long Stone stands at the point where the parishes of Gidleigh and Chagford end and Duchy of Cornwall land begins.