Merrivale Standing Stone (menhir), Dartmoor (c) JP Mundy 2012
My wanderings around the UK this (northern) winter, have brought me down to very wet, but always beautiful south Devon countryside, to visit friends. The only solution for socialising in the current inclement (think floods, driving rain, more floods) is to meet up at some of the country’s gorgeous pubs, so we had every excuse we needed to find our way to the Dartmoor Inn at Merrivale, high up on sodden and windswept Dartmoor. Just behind the Inn is the old Merrivale granite quarry which once provided the stones for London Bridge. Just a short walk from the Inn across the saturated moor, are some remarkable groups of standing stones (think Stone Henge but smaller and wilder) and double stone rows thought to have been placed there over 4000 years ago, though noone is really sure what prupose they served: celestial alignments to help with planting, burial sites or other sorts of ritual seem to get the most votes.
4000 years old and counting: Merrivale Stone Rows on Dartmoor (c) JP Mundy
Dartmoor itself apparently has more than 70 stone ‘rows’, standing circles and towering standing stones on various sites. Merrivale is the largest and most diverse site on the whole moor with a number of parallel double and single stone rows, a stone circle, menhir (standing stone) and burial chamber.
As fascinating as all the stones were, probably the most interesting part of the walk was coming across a Dartmoor ‘quaver’, surely the nominee for the weirdest bog-effect in the world: somehow the dense peat matted together in places to hold bubbles of water under its surface, and walking on it was somewhat like walking on a bubbly water bed. Utterly bizarre.
Melbourne Walks 
The stone rows vary in design and range from single to triple and quadruple alignments and range from a few metres to 3.32 kilometres in length. Many of the rows are directly associated with ring cairns and their burial kists but there is a possibility that these were added at a later date. Very little excavation work has been carried out on the rows with only the Cholwichtown row being examined. Despite work being carried out on the whole length of the row and its surroundings nothing conclusive was discovered. There was evidence of 38 sockets from which the stones had been removed and pollen analysis revealed that at one time the row stood in a oak wood clearing in which cereals had been cultivated. A phosphate test on the Holne Moor row revealed the possibility of a burial but this result was thought to be tenuous to say the least.
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Wow Quinn – thanks so much for the additional info – I did find it hard to find much info about the stones, though a Totnes friend gave me a local book which had a bit of detail. Even to the lay person, their use and meaning is intriguing – perhaps all the more so for not being well understood. Are you an archeologist? J.
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