Wistman's Wood

The oaks grow sideways from a boulder field, their trunks wrapped in moss so thick it muffles every sound. Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor is one of the last fragments of ancient high-altitude oakwood in Britain — older-feeling than history, and wilder than anything else southern England offers.

Perched at 380 metres above the West Dart, Wistman's Wood covers scarcely three and a half hectares, its pedunculate oaks stunted by altitude and wind to a tangle rarely topping five metres, their ages measured in centuries. The Ice Age boulder field beneath them shelters rare lichens, mosses and ferns that grow nowhere else on the moor — which is why the wood is experienced from its edge: walkers are asked not to enter, and the path along the boundary gives the full force of the twisted canopy without a single fragile cushion of moss underfoot. The walk in from Two Bridges crosses open moorland where Dartmoor ponies graze beside the river, and the wood appears ahead as a green anomaly on the bare hillside — a surviving whisper of the wildwood that once covered the whole moor.