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And when I stumbled in my cub-scout shorts to find the Longstone Barrow, which I had only seen in a blurred pamphlet picture, my divorcee dad waited patiently in a car at the bottom of Challacombe Common, counting down the functional alcoholic hours to opening time.

The sensibly shod 17th-century parson, mapping the megaliths between funerals and marriages, and the aristocratic antiquary, pleading with some Cornish farmer to spare the collapsed burial chamber whose capstone he had earmarked for a pigsty, would recognise the Weird Walkers as kindred spirits.

The stretch of moor between the storied Warren House Inn and the foreboding interwar plantation of Fernworthy Forest is classic Dartmoor; the grasses are thick underfoot and marshy ground emerges without warning, saturated by the capricious weather.

The early bird is rewarded with a slow reveal of colour, as the stones morph from deep blacks to a complex collection of hues drawn from lichen, shadowed grooves and the unusual conglomerate rock itself.

In one tale, they are said to have arrived in the village when flung from the Black Mountains by the wizard Jack o’ Kent during one of his regular chucking competitions with the devil, although their current name derives from the idea that they mark the site of the defeat of three Welsh elders by King Harold.

Their true origins lie much earlier, in the bronze age, but perhaps talk of Harold preserves a folk memory of the stones’ use as an assembly point for those fighting the English king, or even as a site of conflict with the invaders from beyond Offa’s Dyke.

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