Dartmoor has many prehistoric sites, but most are isolated and difficult to reach. But the stone rows at Merrivale are just a short walk from a convenient car park. There are three rows up to 200 yards (182m) long, and the site is on beautiful grass moorland, so you will be able to enjoy a superb vista as well as puzzle on why our ancestors created their patterns of stones, something no expert can fathom with any certainty. Merrivale is on the B3357 Two Bridges to Tavistock Road, about three miles west of Two Bridges.

This hamlet on the B3212 between Two Bridges and Moretonhampstead has the only intact clapper bridge left on Dartmoor. It is made from flat granite slabs laid across granite pillars and was used by packhorses taking tin from the local mines – Golden Dagger and Vitifer – to Tavistock. The bridge was first recorded in 1380 and is believed to have been built even earlier.

Beside the road below Hound Tor, between Swine Down and Heatree Cross, lies a little mound known as Jay''s Grave, marked by a posy of fresh flowers. Kitty Jay was a poorhouse orphan of the 19th century who went into service on a farm and, aged about 16, was seduced by a farm labourer and fell pregnant. Shame and persecution by her employers led her to hang herself in a bar. As a suicide, she was denied burial in any of the neighbouring churchyards, and so was interred at this wayside spot. The legend was authenticated in 1860 when the grave was investigated and the skeleton of poor Kitty found and reburied. The real mystery is the fresh flowers. No one will admit to providing them, but still they appear regularly.

One of the most accessible tors, and easily the most visited. There are three car parks on the B3387 Bovey Tracey to Widecombe road. The rock formation is reachable after a fairly gentle, grassy climb. The reward is a fabulous view across a tor-scattered, rocky moor in one direction and, in the other, across rolling farmland to the sea.

The 15-mile track climbs 600ft from the Tarka Line, near Coleford, through Okehampton Station and on to Meldon, high on the flank of Dartmoor. The line survived the Beeching axe, and is now being developed by a public/private partnership to once again serve this area of Devon and the Dartmoor National Park through which it runs.

The song is said to be based on a true story and Tom Cobley''s grave is in Spreyton, north of Dartmoor. But he died in 1844, aged 82, and if a party set off with Tom Pearce''s mare, it probably didn''t include old uncle Tom as Widecombe Fair didn''t start until November 1850, when a cattle fair was reported at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, to give the village its full title. The vicar, Rev J H Mason, delighted that one of his South Devon cattle fetched £15-10s (£15.50) gave a dinner party in ''Fine Old English Style'' at that first fair. It is said the guests left ''brimful of enjoyment'' and the fair has been held ever since, in latter years on the first Tuesday of September. The village is now a tourist attraction all year.

Forbidding and bleak, nothing represents the dark side of the moor so eloquently as the prison that''s been part of the landscape since construction began in 1806. As French prisoners of war began to fill prison ships at Britain''s naval ports along the south coast, desperate meaures were called for. Unhindered by niceties like the Geneva Convention or the Human Rights Act, working parties of prisoners were simply marched up to Princetown and ordered to build themselves a prison!

They were times of great brutality and tough conditions at 1400ft. The prisoners used stone from the surface of the moor and granite hewn and broken by prisoners in nearby quarries. The French were quickly joined by American prisoners of war and, by 1813, the jail, with a capacity of 5000 had 9000 captives. Dreadful though the conditions were, it was far better than the disease-ridden prison ships.

But by 1816 the jail was empty and Princetown a ghost town as, the war over, captives were repatriated. It wasn''t until the 1850s that, with Australia removed as a destination for transported convicts, the jail was opened up again. It quickly became one othe most feared prisons in the world by convicts and wardens alike. Now, after modernisation costing in excess of £30m, the jail isn''t even a high security category. It''s a modern place with a high priority to reform rather than punish. But on a dark night or in a blizzard or with the frequent grey rain sweeping off the moor, its dark outline would send a shiver of fear down most backs.

Princetown''s Rowe Duchy Hotel was the temporary home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as he wrote ''Hound of the Baskervilles'' almost entirely by hand. The author and his friend Fletcher Robinson travelled out onto Dartmoor to gain inspiration and find locations for the terrifying story. The book was first serialised in ''The Strand'' magazine in 1901 and caused mayhem in London as people queued to lay their hands on an early copy. It shows that hype like ''Harry Potter'' is nothing new. It was Doyle''s most popular book and has left an indelible mark of terror on the legends of Dartmoor.

Horror stories were nothing new to Dartmoor when Conan Doyle arrived. On October 21, 1638, lightning struck St Pancras Church in Widecombe, severely damaging the Church, especially the tower, and several people lost their lives. But legend attributes the disaster to satanic agency rather than act of God. A woman who kept the inn at nearby Poundsgate testified that on the day in question, a rider mounted on a coal-black steed called at her house and inquired the road to the village. Unwittingly she told him, and was immediately horrified as the liquor which he drank hissed as it passed down his throat. Seeing he was discovered, the fiend galloped off for Widecombe and disaster ensued.

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