Wistman's Wood — forest
alex jane from london, uk · CC BY-SA 2.0

Wistman's Wood

  • 2 min read
  • 50.583° N 3.959° W

Interesting facts

  • In 1866 Wentworth Buller felled one of the oaks to find out its age, counting about 168 rings; a boulder east of the wood, the Buller Stone, records the attempt.
  • A permanent vegetation plot at the southern end of the wood is the oldest known in British woodland, part of it first recorded by Richard Hansford Worth in 1921.
  • Most of the oaks rarely exceed 4.5 metres, yet by 1997 the tallest trees reached about 12 metres, with an average height of around 7 metres.
  • The oldest oaks are thought to have survived two centuries of colder climate as scrub before growing upward as conditions warmed.
  • According to one tradition, the wood was planted by Isabella de Fortibus, Countess of Devon, who lived from 1237 to 1293.
  • Just north of the wood, a weir on the West Dart feeds the Devonport Leat, dug in the 1790s to carry Dartmoor water to the Plymouth dockyards.
  • Dartmoor's other two high-altitude oakwoods are Black-a-Tor Copse on the West Okement River and Piles Copse on the River Erme.
  • A scheme launched in 2023 by the Duchy of Cornwall and Natural England aims to double the wood by 2040, using saplings grown from its own acorns.
  • The forest that once covered Dartmoor was largely cleared by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from around 5000 BCE, leaving fragments like this one.

Why it is worth it

High on Dartmoor, in the valley of the West Dart river, a small grove of oaks grows out of a jumble of moss-covered granite boulders. The trees of Wistman's Wood are dwarfed and twisted, with trunks that creep sideways across the rocks and branches draped in mosses, lichens and ferns, so that the whole wood looks barely touched since prehistory. It is one of Britain's best-known fragments of temperate rainforest and one of only three high-altitude oakwoods left on Dartmoor, lying at about 380 to 410 metres above sea level.

The wood covers only about 3.5 hectares, split into a North, Middle and South Grove on a sheltered south-west-facing slope of boulders, known locally as clatter. Its trees are mostly pedunculate oak, with a little rowan, holly, hawthorn, hazel and willow. Because limbs lie almost flat, humus gathers on them and plants that normally grow on the ground take root in the branches; polypody fern and bilberry are the most common of these. Around 120 species of lichen have been recorded, and the wood is also home to a large population of adders. The oldest oaks are thought to be 400 to 500 years old. Around 1620 they were described as being no taller than a man; they have grown markedly since, and a new ring of younger oaks appearing after about 1900 has roughly doubled the area of the wood. The trees are probably a remnant of the forest that covered much of Dartmoor around 7000 BCE before early clearance.

The name is usually explained through the Devon dialect word wisht, meaning eerie or uncanny, and Wistman as a local nickname for the Devil. Local tradition ties the wood to the Wild Hunt and its spectral wisht hounds said to roam the moor at night, and Arthur Conan Doyle's visit is said to have fed into the setting of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Poets, painters and photographers have long been drawn here, and John Fowles wrote about the wood at length in his 1978 essay The Tree. It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, designated in 1964, part of a National Nature Reserve and owned by the Duchy of Cornwall.

Getting there

Wistman's Wood lies in Dartmoor National Park in Devon, in the West Dart valley north of the hamlet of Two Bridges, from where it is reached on foot. The outskirts of Plymouth are about 27 km to the south. The nearest airport is Exeter Airport (EXT), about 42 km to the east.

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From the encyclopaedia

Wistman's Wood is one of Britain's most famous ancient temperate rainforests and one of only a few remote remaining high-altitude oakwoods on Dartmoor in Devon, England. The first written document to mention Wistman's Wood dates to the 17th century, while more recent tree-ring studies show that individual trees could be many hundreds of years old.

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