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'Cornwood is a large parish running far into the moor' wrote Professor W.G. Hoskins. Over 6,000 of its 10,000 acres are moorland and wood, and it is in this huge area that there are the remains of the dwellings of the Bronze Age (around 1,000 B.C.) people who are the first known inhabitants of what is now called Cornwood Parish.
Hut circles and enclosures for their stock can be seen in many places on the southern edge of the Moor(1) where hundreds of people must have lived. We shall never know how many more settlements of these, and later, inhabitants of the parish were built over and became the foundations of outlying farms and cottages from Rook to North Hele, Torr, Hanger, Uppaton and Dinnaton.
The Bronze Age people left memorials to their dead in the form of cairns of stones and occasionally small burial chambers known as Kistvaens. They also raised stone rows, for reasons which we can only guess, and the only one on Dartmoor to run across the top of a hill is on Stalldown above New Waste(2). This consists of 65 stones, many of them huge. The longest stone row on the Moor - said to be the longest in the world - starts a mile further north in a stone circle(3) and runs north for over two miles.
There are no signs that the patrols of Roman soldiers who marched west from the garrison at Exeter along the Ridgeway through Plympton ever turned north into the Yealm Valley. But the Celts who came from Ireland to Cornwall must have reached this far for the stone (now in the British Museum) found near Fardel(4) with Ogam characters engraved on it is Celtic in origin and dates from the fifth century.
There must have been settlements and 'estates' in Saxon times in Cornwood where the woods had been cleared but the only one that has been identified is again at Fardel. When the Doomsday survey was made in 1086 there were five manors in the parish: Cornwood, (now the Delamore(5) estate), Upper & Lower Blachford(6), Fardel and Dinnaton. Much of the parish to the north was then 'waste' of scrub and woodland which was later colonised by free peasants in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The original boundaries of their farms are still marked by the lanes which fan out in the upper valley of the Yealm river, bounded to the north by High House Moor(7), Dendles Wood(8) and New (Watercombe) Waste(9). The oldest farm building in the parish is Cholwich Town(10) which dates from around 1500. This farm was held by the Cholwich family from soon after 1200 to 1835.
Several other farmhouses date from the seventeenth century, including Hanger, Little Stert, Wisdome and South (Lower) Hele. The ruined farm at High House is, as its name implies, the one furthest up on the Moor. It was probably abandoned after the Black Death which impoverished the countryside in 1349, but High House still gives an idea of the layout and size of an early farmstead. From the mid-twelfth century the rich deposits of tin on Dartmoor began to be worked and this continued until the sixteenth century, apart from an interval due to the Black Death. Heaps of stone left by the tinners can be seen in the upper Yealm and Erme valleys and the remains of their 'blowing houses' where the tin was smelted(11). There is also a small beehive hut used by the tinners as a store west of the Erme(12). There are many other remains of interest on Stall Moor as shown on the 1/25,000 Ordnance map. In addition to the cairns on Stalldown there is a ring of stones known as Hillson's House(13) after a mason who took refuge there when there was a threat of invasion by Napoleon in 1805.
There are still big houses on the site of several of the original Doomsday manors and a further fine house at Slade(14). These are in private hands. The manor of Cornwood has passed through many families. The first house known as Dallamoor was built on the hillock opposite the Cornwood Inn in the fourteenth century. The present Delamore was built in 1895 by the Parker family who still live there. Part of Blachford probably dates from the sixteenth century but it was remodelled in the early eighteenth century by Sir John Rogers whose family lived there until recently. Slade was built by a family of that name in the thirteenth century and added to until the nineteenth century. It was owned for many years by first the Cole and then the Savery families whose memorials are in the church. Fardel contains the remains of a mediaeval manor house including a solar. The Raleighs (not Sir Walter but his brother) lived there from the fourteenth centuries and the Heles from the seventeenth. The Heles had been an important South Devon family for more than a hundred years and their first home was at South (Lower) Hele(15) in the parish. Fardel has a detached chapel consecrated in 1432. The church of St. Michael & All Angels(16) has a squat tower which dates probably from the early thirteenth century and part of the chancel is of the same date. The present nave and aisles were added in the fifteenth century. The monolithic granite pillars and the windows are characteristic of many Devon churches built in the Perpendicular style. There are interesting family memorials in the chancel and the Slade chapel. A guide book is available. Cornwood parish covers the village of Lutton, and the hamlets of Corntown, Moor Cross, Torr and Yeo together with about ten farms.
Lutton and the nearby hamlet of Yondertown originally ran along the Old Road past the Mountain Inn and down to Almshouse Bridge, with cottages also rising up Gibb Hill. Cornwood village now stands at the crossing of the Sparkwell - Harford and Yelverton - Ivybridge roads. Down the hill towards Ivybridge runs Bond Street with eighteenth and nineteenth century cottages on the left as far as Langham Bridge. The road to Harford begins in Fore Street which was always wide. Since the memorial to Lord Blachford, the last of the Rogers family and a great local benefactor, was erected a century ago it is known as the Square. Standing in the Square with the Cornwood Inn behind you the first building on the left is the Old Smithy and the last one on the same side is Clergy Cottages once the vicarage. School Lane opposite the cottages leads to the present Primary School built by Lord Blachford in 1859. For many years Cornwood had cattle fairs in May and September. In 1850 there were 40 men described as farmers (ten of them called Horton) working eleven farms.
There were four millers (only Wisdome Mill(17) remains), two carpenters, five shoemakers, two shopkeepers and two wheelwrights. The population was then 1080 souls, not much different from now when it is about 980. The first schoolhouse, built by Rev. Duke Yonge, was then in use. He also enlarged Glebe House which he used as his vicarage, and endowed a charity which is still in existence. By the time of Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1897 the population was 1100, the present National School as it was then called had been built, and there was a post office and a railway station about a mile south of the village. Then there were two bakers, two blacksmiths, a carrier, a bootmaker, a mason and a tombstone engraver.
Most important to future employment in the village, as machinery reduced the demand for farm labour, was the establishment of Martin Bros. Ltd. and Watts, Blake, Bearne & Co. as quarriers of china clay. The Council built houses at Newtown between the wars and at Crossways in 1950. In 1953 the acetylene lighting in the streets was replaced with electric lighting and in the following year electricity was extended to the outlying properties. An estate of private houses was begun in Abbots Park in the late 1960's as Cornwood became increasingly attractive to commuters working in Plymouth and Ivybridge. Sheltered housing has been built by the Council in Churchtown Close and more recently more sheltered housing and houses to rent have gone up opposite Crossways at Church Park.
Thanks to its church, school, post office and shops Cornwood remains a close community. So far it is largely untouched by the rash of second homes and holiday lets which have changed life so much in many villages in the South Hams.
Andrew Bawn. Chairman Cornwood Parish Council. 1991.
