Updated: February 2010

Skaigh Warren - an article by Nick Atkinson in The Beacon - November 2010

A very pleasant, if occasionally steep, walk from Sticklepath Bridge leads you up through Skaigh Woods and across the rough open pastures of what we all know as Skaigh Warren. This area was destined to be afforested with conifers some 50 years ago but was safeguarded as open country and ancient woodland by the people of Belstone, who purchased the land and placed it in trust for the future. The 1888 OS Map of this area labels the land within the enclosing walls as 'Ska Warren', showing it surrounded by a shelterbelt, and including a 'pheasantry'. All of the warrener's trademark buries, or pillow mounds, are however to be found a little further on out on the common west of the enclosure wall. Here the Historic Environment Record for Dartmoor shows 19 buries on the slopes of the Taw Valley opposite Skaigh House and Belstone.
These mounds range from 40ft to 72ft in length, averaging 17ft in width and 3ft in height. William Crossing in 'Dartmoor Worker' describes how the warrener constructed his buries by first digging a narrow trench with smaller ones branching from it on each side, but not opposite each other. Large slabs of turf were then cut to cover these trenches, over which a mound of earth then completed the burrow. To keep them dry, all but one of the buries at Skaigh have ditches around them 4ft wide and 1ft deep, two continuously but the majority without a ditch on their lower sides. Scrub hawthorn trees, gorse and bracken now embellish these remains, and some still provide a home for wild rabbits, although no one shows much interest in them today. In the 19thC heyday of warrening, both for their meat and their skins, rabbits caught in the warrens of north-east Dartmoor were dispatched to the markets of Birmingham and Sheffield by train from Moretonhampstead, which the railway had reached in 1866. Killing the rabbits took place from September to March, and at the turn of the century each was worth 9d or 10d )orc£3.30 today using the r.p.i. formula).
The warren at Skaigh is relatively small compared to the 17 or so others on Dartmoor, that in the Plym Valley for example containing some 160 buries. No warrener's house or kennels are known, nor has evidence been found of vermin traps for the control of predators. But commercial warrening at Skaigh must have been profitable as it continued from the early 1800s up until probably 1876. In that year the Duchy of Cornwall as landowner sought to terminate the lease for a warren on 'Belstone Common', following disturbances between Belstone villagers and the warrener, Mr Fewings, that had ended up before Hatherleigh magistrates the previous year. It seems incontrovertible that the warren in question was that at Skaigh, although the land on which it sits is very much a part of South Tawton Common. Given the rumbustious relationships of that era between the good people of Belstone and those of South Zeal, it seems territorially anomalous that the Duchy's reference is to 'Belstone Common'. Whether or not Skaigh warren ceased in 1876, a great blizzard in 1891 accounted for thousands of rabbits across Dartmoor and depopulated many of the other warrens. Some recovered to a degree, and commercial warrening continued in places up until 1954 when an epidemic of myxomotosis accounted for 99% of the rabbit population. If a final death knell was needed, the County Council declared Devon a rabbit clearance area in 1956, and the industry, whose earliest reference on Dartmoor dates back to 1292, became illegal.

Nick Atkinson 'The Beacon' Magazine November 2009

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