Higher Moorland Visitor Centre

Dartmoor National Park


At the tourist office–visitor centre, heritage displays include those on tin workings, gunpowder factories, ecology and legends – there's also a stunning time-lapse video.

The building used to be the Duchy Hotel; one former guest was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who went on to write The Hound of the Baskervilles. Dartmoor lore recounts that local man Henry Baskerville took the novelist on a carriage tour, and the brooding landscape he encountered, coupled with legends of huge phantom dogs, inspired the thriller.