Wild Camping on Dartmoor - National Parks by Rail

First wild camp of the year? Gotta be Dartmoor.

Criteria for this weekend adventure were: easily done from London, not too late back on Sunday, and do-able in dodgy weather (it was the first weekend in May, after all). So we headed down to Ivybridge early Saturday morning, and trekked north into Dartmoor.

Saturday was glorious, weather wise, and despite a late train we made excellent progress up onto the moor – with time to do some off-track exploring and go in search of a good water source. Our chosen camping spot was at an abandoned china clay mine, with a beautiful flooded pit – so we even managed a couple of (pretty bracing) swims.

Sunday morning, on the other hand, brought some pretty hefty fog (Dartmoor is famous for both it’s unpredictable weather, and it’s fog!). We decided to give it another hour to see if things cleared, and go for another swim in the meantime. Things did not clear. And unfortunately we were forced to retrace our previous route out, rather than go for the more adventurous route we’d planned. Things cleared up nicely as we got down to lower areas though, and it turned into a pretty lovely day for the last leg back to Ivybridge.

We headed back to Totnes for a late pub lunch, before hopping back on the fast train to Paddington.

Despite the fog-induced change of plans, this turned out to be a wonderful weekend, and remarkably straightforward logistics-wise.

Trains

Outbound, we got the 8.04am from Paddington, arriving at Totnes at 10.42am.
We’d then planned on getting the 11.03am from Totnes, arriving at Ivybridge for 11.17am – unfortuantely some delays heading toward Devon meant we ended up getting to Ivybridge an hour later than originally planned.

Heading home, we got one of the hourly trains from Ivybridge back into Totnes; where we had a late lunch and waited for our pre-booked 3.41pm from Totnes, arriving at London Paddington at 6.24pm. Thankfully no delays on the way home!

We booked fixed-time advance tickets for the London to Totnes and return legs. With a Two-Together Railcard and an extra promotion to encourage people to travel again after the Covid-19 restrictions, this came to £85 for both of us.

Open tickets from Totnes to Ivybridge and back (again, with a Two Together Railcard) were £14.

Walking

You can view the base route we used on Komoot, here. The stream where we topped up with water is directly East of Red Lake.

If you’re tweaking the route (which you should – it’s more fun when it’s your own!), we can use Komoot, the OS Maps website, or many others.

Variations

This adventure will work best if you flex it to suit your own plans and what you’re looking for. Take this as inspiration and plan your own version of the walk, pick your own camping spot, and decide how much flex you need in timings.

If you want to make major changes though, the following ideas are all untested, but we reckon you could probably…

If you packed light (ie no overnight gear!), you could turn this into a circular walk by combining our planned in and out routes, and do this in a day.
Continue on to Okehampton, and get the train back from there. (Book one set of advance tickets to Exeter St David’s, then flexible ones to Ivybridge and from Okehampton back to Exeter). This is quite a trek though, so make sure you’re up for this level of walk before diving in.

One of us has also done a similar walk starting from Totnes and heading into the moor via Buckfastleigh. It’s not quite as scenic, but still perfectly nice and very do-able. No GPX for that though, sorry!