Perhaps the most distinctive and enigmatic of the prehistoric monuments on Dartmoor are the stone rows. Dartmoor has the largest concentrations of stone rows of any area in Britain. There are over seventy stone rows known on Dartmoor today (see listing below) although there were probably once considerably more. A small number of the rows recorded by antiquarians in the nineteenth century have disappeared either through destruction at the hands of road and newtake wall builders whilst others may have simply receded into the peat1.
The stone rows consist of one or more roughly straight lines of standing stones many of which include structures such as cairn circles or large standing stones at either or both ends. The rows consist of a wide variety of size stones and a wide variety of lengths.
The single rows are typically 40 to 200 m in length2 although there are four rows on the southern moor which are over 0.5 km in length (Burford Down, Stall Moor (Upper Erme), Stalldown and Butterdon Hill). Curiously these four rows are all very roughly north-south in orientation. The longest is the Stall Moor stone row which stretches for 3.1 km from The Dancers (Upper Erme) cairn circle over rough terrain with stones going up and down gullies all the way to a cairn on Green Hill.
There are many double and a few triple stone rows on Dartmoor. These rows are typically between 100m and 200m in length. Particularly fine examples of double rows include Merrivale, Hurston Ridge and the Assycombe stone rows. The Cosdon and Challacombe rows are the most impressive of the triple stone rows. At Corringdon Ball there is an odd complex variously described as a seven-fold stone row or a combination of two triple stone rows consisting of very small stones.
The double stone rows have often been referred to as stone avenues suggesting that they may have had some kind of ritual processional purpose. However whilst some have an average spacing of around 3.0m between the rows many have spacing less than 0.5m, some as narrow as 0.2m which is too narrow for a ritual pathway. The spacing of the stones within a row is very irregular as is the spacing in-between rows3. A good example is the Assycombe double stone row which has a distance between the rows that fluctuates wildly between 1.0m and 1.6m.