Princetown

Princetown, best known for its forbidding prison, stands 1400 feet above sea level in an area of the moor that is notorious for its atrocious climate. It gets doused with 80 to 100 inches of rain a year, more than three times the average for Exeter, which is less than 20 miles away.

That a settlement should be located here at all was the brainchild of one man, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, the owner of a local granite quarry. He proposed that a special prison should be built here to house the thousands of troops captured during the Napoleonic wars who were becoming too numerous and unruly for the prison ships moored in Plymouth Sound. The work was completed in 1809 by the prisoners themselves using granite from Sir Thomas’ quarry. Paid at the rate of sixpence (2½p) a day, they also built the main east-west road across the moor, which is now the B3212. Yet another of their constructions was the nearby Church of St Mary, a charmless building in whose churchyard stands a tall granite cross in memory of all those prisoners whose bodies lie in unmarked graves. (The mortality rate of the inmates in the early 1800s was 50%.) Since around 1900, prisoners’ graves have been marked just with their initials and date of death. The lines of small stones are a gloomy sight.

At one time the prison held as many as 9000 French and, later, American inmates, but by 1816, with the cessation of hostilities, the prison became redundant and was closed. Princetown virtually collapsed as a result and it wasn’t until 1823 that its granite quarries were given a new lease of life with the building of the horse-drawn Dartmoor Railway, another of Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt’s initiatives. The prison was eventually re-opened for long-serving convicts in 1850 and since then it has been considerably enlarged and upgraded. It is currently in use as a medium security prison with around 640 inmates. The Dartmoor Prison Heritage Centre has exhibits detailing the history of the institution.

Also in the town is the National Park’s Moorland Visitors’ Centre, which contains some excellent and informative displays about the moor, and also stocks a wide range of books, maps and leaflets. The centre is housed in the former Duchy Hotel where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stayed while writing some chapters of The Hound of the Baskervilles, much of which is set in Dartmoor.