Bowerman's Nose

[2] For example, Richard Polwhele described it in around 1800 as fifty feet high,[3] and in the 1820s Carrington wrote of it: On the very edge Of the vast moorland, startling every eye, A shape enormous rises!

High it towers Above the hill's bold brow, and, seen from far, Assumes the human form;—a Granite God!— To whom, in days long flown, the suppliant knee In trembling homage bow'd.

[4] Samuel Rowe in 1848 reckoned it was rather less than forty feet tall and likened it to the statues on Easter Island, saying that "it is easy to conceive that [it] might have been pointed out to an ignorant and deluded people as the object of worship".

[2] With a little imagination, it is possible to see the profile of a human face in the rocky outline, but as John Page said in 1889: "If his nose bore any resemblance to the topmost layer of the pile, it cannot have boasted much comeliness.

[4] However, Eric Hemery noted that a John Bowerman was buried at North Bovey in 1663 and that the name also appears in a Dean Prior register of 1772, so it is possible that the name is of no great antiquity.