At the Stone Cross junction of three roads from Buckland-in-the-Moor, Cockingford Bridge and Cold East Cross, there is a granite direction stone, which is thought to be one of the only dated examples (perhaps the only one) on Dartmoor. Stone Cross Guide Post is incised on three sides and has a date of 1790 on it. The Guide Post is not on a parish boundary and it has been suggested that it probably takes its name from the adjoining Stone Farm.
The guide stone inscription reads : ‘1790 Newton/Ash Bur Ton / W’, the last letter indicating the route to Widecombe. It was erected by Buckland Parish and their highways accounts record the setting up of two stones in that year – “Dec 27th 1790 for putting down of two diricting posts 6s 2d”. The conjecture is that the second guide post would almost certainly have been erected at nearby Cold East cross, on the main Ashburton-Chagford highway, but has long since disappeared. In the summer after the guide stones were erected, a stretch of the road leading across Pudsham Down towards Cold East cross was repaired at a cost of £7 10s, and this was relaid again in 1824 – in which year the grand total of £14 9s 7d was expended on that section of the parish road.
In 2012 (Fox), the route of a possible droveway from Cockington up onto Dartmoor via Denbury and Waye was recorded. He (Fox) suggested two possible routes around Denbury hillfort, and then suggested a final leg of the droveway, which crossed the East Webbern at the appropriately named Cockingford. This droveway passed by the Guide Post, between Cold East Cross and Cockingford.
Further to this, research from 2018-9 (Jones) suggested that the route identified by Fox was not simply a droveway but a transhumance route running from Cockington (in Torbay) to Cockingford. The records from Fox and Jones are essentially the same with the subtle difference being that a droveway was simply the route for droving livestock on foot from one place to another, and transhumance being a type of pastoralism or nomadism, a seasonal movement of livestock between fixed summer and winter pastures.
Bibliography
- Mike Brown – Dartmoor Field Guides (Volume 41) – page 1
- H.Fox (2012) – Dartmoor’s Alluring Uplands: Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages, 194-209
- S.Jones (2018-2019) – Alston Lane Droveway (Un-published)
- L.Bray (2017) – Stone Farm (Un-published).
