EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

PRINCETOWN owes its growth to the presence of Dartmoor Prison, a high-security jail originally constructed for POWs captured in the Napoleonic wars. Its grim spirit seeps into the village, which has a somewhat oppressed air and functional grey stone houses, some of them - like the parish church of St Michael - built by French and American prisoners. What Princetown lacks in beauty is amply compensated for by the surrounding country, the best of which lies immediately to the north.

Information on all of Dartmoor is given by the main National Park information centre , on the village's central green (daily: Easter-Oct 10am-5pm; Nov-March 10am-4pm; tel 01822/890414, ). The best places to stay include the central and friendly Lamorna on Two Bridges Road (tel 01822/890360; under £40) and the non-smoking Duchy House on Tavistock Road (tel 01822/890552, duchyhouse@aol.com ; under £40; closed Nov), which also runs a café . Two pubs in Princetown's central square also offer accommodation, the Railway Inn (tel 01822/890232; under £40) and the Plume of Feathers (tel 01822/890240; under £40); the latter claims to be the oldest building in town, and also has dormitory accommodation in two bunkhouses as well as a convenient campsite - staple bar-food is always available.

Northeast of Princetown, two miles north of the crossroads at Two Bridges, the dwarfed and misshapen oaks of Wistman's Wood are an evocative relic of the original Dartmoor Forest, cluttered with lichen-covered boulders and a dense undergrowth of ferns. The gnarled old trees are alleged to have been the site of druidic gatherings, a story unsupported by any evidence but quite plausible in this solitary spot. Two Bridges has a basic example of Dartmoor's clapper bridges - simple structures which consist of huge slabs of granite supported by piers of the same material, used by tin-miners and farmers since medieval times - but the largest and best preserved of these crosses the East Dart river three miles northeast of Two Bridges at POSTBRIDGE . Walkers from Postbridge can explore up and down the river, or press further south through Bellever Forest to the open moor beyond. On the edge of the forest, a couple of miles south of Postbridge on the banks of the East Dart river, lies one of Dartmoor's three youth hostels (tel 01822/880227) - it's on a minor road from Postbridge, but there's no public transport. There's also a camping barn (tel 01200/420102) close to Bellever Forest at Runnage Farm with a bunkhouse and outdoor camping facilities alongside - for this and any of Dartmoor's other camping barns, it's wise to book ahead, particularly at weekends. You'll find more luxury in the riverside Lydgate House Hotel , signposted off the main road half a mile southwest of Postbridge and offering easy access to Bellever Forest and the moor (tel 01822/880209; £70-90). Two miles northeast of Postbridge, the solitary Warren House Inn offers warm, firelit comfort and meals in a bleak tract of moorland.

To the east of the B3212, reachable on a right turn towards Widecombe-in-the-Moor, the Bronze Age village of Grimspound lies about a mile off the road. Inhabited some three thousand years ago, this is the most complete example of Dartmoor's prehistoric settlements, consisting of twenty-four circular huts scattered within a four-acre enclosure. The site is thought to have been the model for the Stone Age settlement in which Sherlock Holmes camped in The Hound of the Baskervilles , while Hound Tor , an outcrop three miles to the southwest, was the inspiration for Conan Doyle's tale - according to local legend, phantom hounds were sighted racing across the moor to hurl themselves on the tomb of a hated squire following his death in 1677.