By J.C. Aldred in Landscape — 07 May 2026

Dartmoor: Myth and Legend on England's Wildest Moor

Dartmoor does not look like the rest of England. It sits in the middle of Devon like a different country — 368 square miles of upland blanket bog, granite outcrops, and ancient weather, rising to over 2,000 feet at its highest points and generating its own climate with apparent indifference to whatever is happening at sea level around it. The moor can be warm and clear in the valleys while a haar comes down on the tors above. It can snow in April. It can disappear in fog for days at a time.

It has been inhabited, in various forms, for at least four thousand years. The Bronze Age settlers who built the stone rows, the stone circles, the burial cairns, and the mysterious parallel alignments that cross the moor in long, fading lines have left more visible evidence of themselves here than almost anywhere else in Britain. Their structures are still standing. We do not know what they were for.

A landscape this old, this strange, and this consistently inhospitable accumulates legends the way the bog accumulates peat: slowly, relentlessly, over a very long time.

What Is Dartmoor?

Dartmoor is a high moorland plateau in Devon, designated a National Park in 1951, covering an area roughly twenty miles across in each direction. Its characteristic features are the granite tors — outcrops of weather-sculpted rock that rise above the surrounding moorland, each with its own name and most with their own tradition — the blanket bog that covers the higher ground, the river valleys that cut down through the moor to the farmland below, and the remains of four thousand years of human habitation laid over and under each other in a stratigraphy that archaeologists are still untangling.

It is also a working landscape — home to Dartmoor ponies, sheep, and the commoners' rights that have governed the moor's use for centuries — and a military training ground, large sections of which are closed to the public for live firing. The combination of ancient monument, working farm, military zone, and national park gives Dartmoor a particular quality of contested, layered occupation that its legends tend to reflect.

The Hairy Hands

The most specific piece of Dartmoor supernatural lore, and the one with the most persistent modern currency, concerns a short stretch of the B3212 road between Postbridge and Two Bridges.

The hairy hands legend holds that on this stretch of road, drivers and cyclists have experienced an invisible force grabbing their steering wheel or handlebars and forcing them off the road. The incidents recorded in the 1920s — when the legend first appears in documented form — include a number of actual accidents on this section, including the death of a military officer in 1921, which was attributed by some to the hairy hands.

The rational explanation for the accidents is more mundane: the B3212 through this section of the moor has a difficult camber and was, in the 1920s, not well suited to the volume and speed of motorised traffic using it. Road accidents on unfamiliar moorland roads were common. The attribution of the accidents to a supernatural force is characteristic of how folklore processes repeated trauma in a specific location — it generates an explanation that is memorable and location-specific, one that warns subsequent travellers to be cautious on this particular stretch.

What is interesting about the hairy hands is their specificity. They are not ghostly presences or spectral figures but a physical, tactile force — hands, specifically, reaching from outside the vehicle. This level of bodily detail is unusual in road ghost traditions, which more commonly deal in apparitions or strange lights. The hairy hands feel like a translation of a physical experience — the sudden lurch of a vehicle on a bad road surface, the sensation of the steering pulling — into supernatural terms.

A woman camping near the spot in the 1920s claimed to have seen a pair of hairy hands crawling up the outside of her caravan window. Her account was widely reported. The legend has been stable ever since.

Pixies and Being Pixy-Led

Dartmoor has one of the strongest surviving traditions of pixie lore in England — and it is worth distinguishing immediately between the Dartmoor pixie and the winged fairy of Victorian illustration. They are not the same creature and should not be confused.

The pixie of Dartmoor tradition is small, mischievous, and fundamentally associated with leading travellers astray. To be pixy-led is to be confused on the moor — to find yourself walking in circles, unable to locate a familiar landmark, convinced you are on the right path while consistently arriving back where you started. The remedy, in tradition, is to turn your coat inside out, which breaks the enchantment and allows you to find your way again.

Pixy-led confusion on Dartmoor is almost certainly a genuine perceptual experience rooted in the moor's actual character. The blanket bog is largely featureless at ground level. In mist or low cloud — conditions that arrive quickly and without warning — the usual navigational landmarks disappear. The absence of trees over large areas means there are no vertical features to orient by. The drainage channels and paths can all look identical. Experienced walkers have become seriously lost on Dartmoor in conditions that seemed manageable.

The inside-out coat remedy is more interesting than it appears. Turning a garment inside out is a deliberate physical action that interrupts automatic behaviour — it forces a pause, a moment of doing something unusual, which may be enough to break the cognitive loop that keeps a disoriented walker moving in circles. The folklore encodes a genuinely useful intervention in the idiom of magical protection.

Pixie traditions on Dartmoor are attached to specific locations — Pixies' Parlour near Okehampton, Pixies' Cave near Sheepstor — and to specific behaviours. They pinch sleepers, lead horses astray, steal children (leaving changelings), and play music that cannot be located. The music tradition in particular is associated with the natural sounds of the moor — the wind in the granite, the sound of water moving through the bog — rendered as intentional and mischievous rather than accidental.

The Devil's Tor and the Landscape of Diabolism

Dartmoor's prehistoric monuments have attracted diabolical explanations since at least the medieval period. The stone rows at Merrivale, the stone circles at Scorhill and Grey Wethers, the standing stones scattered across the moor — all of them generated legends associating them with the Devil, with witchcraft, or with gatherings of supernatural beings.

The Grey Wethers stone circles, two adjacent circles on the northern moor, were said to be the petrified remains of a flock of sheep — sold to a credulous buyer by a trickster who disappeared before the buyer realised he had purchased stone rather than livestock. The Hurlers on Bodmin Moor — three stone circles just over the border in Cornwall — were said to be men petrified for playing hurling on a Sunday. These aetiological legends, explaining the existence of prehistoric monuments by reference to transgression and punishment, are common across the British Isles wherever standing stones appear.

The diabolical associations are not random. In the medieval Christian worldview, large prehistoric structures that could not be explained by known history had to have been made by someone, and the available candidates were giants, the Devil, or both. The Devil's name appears in Dartmoor place names — Devil's Tor, the Devil's Frying Pan, the Devil's Cauldron — not because there was a specific tradition of Satanic activity at these locations but because the name was applied as a default explanation for anything ancient and inexplicable.

The legends are now so thoroughly attached to the landscape that they form part of its identity. A visitor to Dartmoor today who reads about the Grey Wethers sheep legend is receiving a piece of medieval commentary on prehistoric archaeology, filtered through centuries of oral tradition, and experiencing it as local colour.

Hounds of the Moor

Dartmoor has its own phantom hound tradition, though it differs in character from the Black Shuck of the Suffolk coast.

The Dartmoor version is usually described as a pack rather than a single animal — the Wisht Hounds, led by a dark huntsman associated with the Wild Hunt tradition. They are said to hunt across the moor at night, their baying audible before and after they pass. Unlike Black Shuck, who is typically a solitary creature tied to a specific landscape feature, the Wisht Hounds are a cavalcade — a Dartmoor manifestation of the pan-European Wild Hunt tradition of spectral riders and hounds.

The huntsman who leads them has been identified variously with the Devil, with a figure called Dewer, and with the ghost of a specific wicked squire whose name varies by account. The huntsman at the head of the Wild Hunt is always local in British tradition — each region generating its own specific figure to lead a general belief — and Dartmoor's version reflects both the Wild Hunt template and the moor's own character: not a single road ghost but a moving, howling presence crossing the open ground.

Arthur Conan Doyle's visit to Dartmoor in 1901, and the resulting Hound of the Baskervilles, drew on this tradition as well as on Black Shuck. The spectral hound of Baskerville Hall is partly a Devon creature, not only a Suffolk one — the phantom dog tradition of the moor feeding into the novel alongside the East Anglian legend.

The Moor as Active Landscape

What distinguishes Dartmoor's folklore from many regional traditions is the degree to which the landscape itself is the protagonist. The hairy hands come from the road. The pixies come from the featureless bog. The Wisht Hounds come from the open moorland. The Devil built the tors and petrified the standing stones. None of these legends makes sense removed from the specific geography that generated them.

This is what the Fens' folklore and Dartmoor's folklore share: the landscape is not a backdrop for supernatural events but their source. The moor generates its legends through its actual character — its mist, its featurelessness, its sudden dangers, its ancient and unreadable structures — and the legends in turn tell you something true about what it is like to be in the landscape, if you know how to read them.