Walking on Dartmoor. Earle John

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      A tinner's Mould Stone

      Early Iron Age men were next to live on Dartmoor as the remains at Kes Tor proved, where a whole community dwelt, with an iron-smelter's house and workshop nearby in its own pound. The date has now come up to the fifth century BC. Then there appears to be a gap in the human occupation of the moor from about 400BC until the coming of the Anglo-Saxons at about 700AD.

      It was at this time that the houses changed from the round hut circles of the Bronze Age to rectangular shapes with their surrounding field systems. The remains of these houses are stone-walled but excavation has discovered that very often below the foundation are the post holes of wattle and turf huts from earlier times, the sites having been rebuilt on many times. The medieval village at Houndtor is perhaps the best-known example. By the various dating systems used, it is interesting to find that the early Saxons built in wood though there were large quantities of stone available and there must have been evidence of earlier men building in stone. It was not until about 1200 that stone buildings reappear.

      All through the early days of the Saxons and into medieval times Dartmoor was not actually claimed by any group but plenty of people took advantage of the good summer grazing and drove their sheep and cattle onto the moor as the many lanes leading up onto the high land indicate.

      It was the Normans who made Dartmoor one of the royal hunting forests and so began the organisation of administration and allocation of land on the moor. The name Dartmoor Forest has persisted from this time and can be misleading. It was a term used for a royal hunting area and did not necessarily mean that the land was covered with forests. It was also about this time that the ancient Dartmoor tenements were founded and the whole conception of ‘commoners’ who had grazing rights on the moorland started.

      Tin was mined in Cornwall in the times of the Bronze Age but we first find documentary evidence of alluvial tin in streaming in the year 1156, near Sheepstor and Brisworthy. In that year about 60 tons of smelted tin were produced. Within fifteen years or so the production had risen to over 300 tons a year.

      So the early tinners used an opencast mining system working on the broad, shallow, river valleys where the rich tin deposits had been carried by floods and were contained in the sands and gravels. The larger stones containing tin ores were crushed in primitive mills and then washed or streamed with the other tin-bearing sand from the river bed. Smelting took place over a peat fire which produced impure lumps of tin but there were also more refined smelting centres.

      By the 13th century blowing houses had been introduced for smelting where charcoal was used as the fuel and the molten metal ran from the furnace into the moulds. The name blowing house comes from the fact that huge bellows were used, powered by water wheels, to help produce the intense heat needed. Quite a few remains of blowing houses can be found on Dartmoor though not many have the moulds and wheel pits to be seen.