Among a tangle of fallen tree trunks, vegetation, narrow channels and pools, we find what we are looking for - a tree stump tapering to a classic, cartoon-like 'pencil top'. If you look closely, you can make out the tooth marks that chiselled it. Thesight would have been instantly I recognisable to our ancestors 1,000 or more years ago, though it disappeared from the British landscape for good some time in the 1500s. But here, in a tiny site under the north-west shadow of Dartmoor, the pencil top, and its creator the Eurasian beaver, is making a comeback.Until three years ago, the spot I'm standing in was a willow and silver birch woodland with a small stream running through it that ran dry in the summer months. Today, it's practically a bog, and the whole area is a rich mosaic of dams, pools, ponds andcanals - all thanks to the beavers. A pair - one from a zoo in Bavaria, another that had been held at Cotswold Water Park - was released into a 3ha, well-fenced enclosure in 2011, and in just three years they have completely transformed it.
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