TORS OF DARTMOOR
a database of both lesser- & well-known rocks and outcrops
Buller Stone, TheBuller's Stone, Druid Stone, Druid's Stone
 We learn from Eric Hemery (1983) that: "Near the higher verge of the central grove [of Wistman's Wood] stands a huge triangular slab; this bears an inscription to mark the felling of a young oak by the botanist Wentworth Buller in 1866, part of the trunk later being deposited in the Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter."  However, the inscription actually reads:
BY PERMISSION OF
HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES WENTWORTH BULLER ON SEPT 16th 1868 CUT DOWN A TREE NEAR THIS SPOT IT MEASURED 9IN IN DIAMETER AND APPEARED TO BE ABOUT 163 YEARS OLD.  Whilst Mike Brown (2001) was probably the first to mention the correct year as 1868, thereby rectifying a longstanding mistake replicated by the likes of William Crossing and Eric Hemery and numerous subsequent commentators, there is no mention that the inscribed diameter of the tree is actually enclosed within an incised circle.  This observation was first announced in a letter to the Dartmoor Magazine by Tim Jenkinson in 2012 who, benefiting from an illuminated sunlit stone in April of that year, was not only able to make that distinction but also confirm the date of 1868. That said the error of '1866' resurfaced just eighteen months later in the same Magazine (number 113) and sadly that incorrect date remains to this day on several well-known websites.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
