Haytor and its tramway

Haytor isn't the most impressive tor on Dartmoor, nor is it the highest, but it is one of the most accessible, is hugely popular and great fun to climb.

We arrived late in the morning on the last full day of our Dartmoor holiday and found the main carparks already full.  It didn't take long, though, to find a space in one on a minor road, from where we set out for Haytor. Notice, by the way, the remains of a quarry on the right.  The land around Haytor was once extensively quarried... but more of that later.

Here's a close-up of the tor. The summit is on the right, and to the left of it there's a deep cleft that one has to jump across before making the final ascent. I was contemplating it and trying to pluck up courage when a young girl scrambled across, and up the other side. "Oh, that looked simple enough," I told myself, before propelling my aged frame over the gap, landing on the other side and not quite slithering back down the rock face.  Easy! 

That's supposed to be a victory wave, not a wartime German salute.  Whoops!

The view from the top.

Haytor really wasn't far enough from the carpark for anything like a 'decent' walk, so we decided to go on to Saddle Tor.  Yes, I can definitely see a saddle shape. I reckon the horse's head is on the right and her tail's on the left.  Agreed?

Here's the view back from the horse's head, in the direction of Haytor.  Saddle Tor was one summit that I had no difficulty in conquering.

Our route back to the carpark mostly followed the course of the Haytor Granite Tramway, which dates back to 1820. According to Wikipedia, the design is "exceedingly unusual" and should correctly be called a flangeway. Personally, I cannot but admire the workmen who formed the 'rails' out of solid granite – the very material that the tramway was built to carry. In this wild and remote place it would presumably have been much more costly to bring in flanged metal rails from elsewhere.

The quarries and tramway closed in about 1859, unable to compete with cheaper supplies of granite from Cornwall. 

 

Incidentally, lest you should be wondering, the difference between a flangeway and a conventional railway is that the flanges were on the track, rather than the wheels.  At one time there were several flangeways (sometimes called 'plateways', I think) near where I live in the Forest of Dean... like this one, the Bixlade Tramway.