right|thumb|Bowerman's Nose
thumb|right|A not very accurate depiction from [[Sabine Baring-Gould|Baring-Gould's A Book of Dartmoor (1907)]]
Bowerman's Nose is a stack of weathered granite on Dartmoor, Devon, England. It is situated on the northern slopes of Hayne Down, about a mile from Hound Tor and close to the village of Manaton at . It is about high and is the hard granite core of a former tor, standing above a 'clitter' of the blocks that have eroded and fallen from it.
Descriptions
The height of the stack was exaggerated by early writers, and it was also regularly described as an ancient object of veneration. For example, Richard Polwhele described it in around 1800 as fifty feet high, and in the 1820s Carrington wrote of it:
In his contemporary notes to Carrington's poem, W. Burt stated that the rocks rise to more than 30 feet, and he also mentioned that it was generally considered as a rock idol, dismissing those who doubted that druids were associated with the moor. John Chudleigh wrote in 1892 that from Manaton it looked like a Turk with a fez cap and mantle wrapped closely around his body. By 1907 it was still being described in Ward Lock's Red Guide to Dartmoor as "forty or fifty feet" tall.
thumb|right|The stack as seen from the top of Hayne Down
Toponymy
It used to be held that the name Bowerman was derived from the Celtic fawr maen, meaning "the great stone", but this theory was refuted by R. Hansford Worth who pointed out that the correct Celtic form would have been maen fawr, so it could not have mutated into Bowerman.
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See also
- List of geographical noses