Belstone Close

According to the standard guide to Devon Place Names the name Belstone is a compound of the Old English belle, meaning ‘bell’, and stan, meaning ‘stone’, hence the name comes from a stone that was shaped like a bell. In support of this notion there is a quote from a book in the ‘Little Guide’ series on counties; the Reverend Sabine Baring Gould edited the Devon volume and in it we read ‘the bellstone was a remarkably fine logan rock that rolled like a ship in a gale … it has been thrown down and broken up by quarrymen’.

Locally there are yet other equally colourful explanations of the name; that this is Belle’s ham or enclosure (it is recorded as Bellestam in the Domesday Survey of 1086) or that this is the ton (the settlement) of Belus or Baal, the Phoenician sun god. In support of this latter notion ‘there is upon Watchet Hill a small idol temple, formed of a double circle of erect stones, the inner one referring to the phases of the moon, and the outer to the sun’. Furthermore ‘the river Taw, which rises in the northern part of the forest derives its name from a deity of the Druids, calld Ta-autos, or the thunderer’ (White’s Devon, 1850).

Best known for its Bronze Age remains, notably the Nine Maidens stone circle, Belstone is just east of South Zeal and South Tawton and Belstone Close is one of a great number of Plymouth place names that owes it origin to a Devon town or village.

EH 26 May 2007