Short answer: East Dartmoor National Nature Reserve is the local one — free, with four car parks so you can build your own loop, and a riverside bird hide. Bellever Forest is the sheltered way onto the moor at £5 all-day parking. Open moor is free but makes its own weather.
Free, and designed to be used flexibly: there are four car parks, which means you build the loop you want rather than walking a fixed circuit. There is a riverside bird hide, and the woodland gives shelter that open moor does not. This is the walk to do if the weather is uncertain.
On the edge of town, with Home Farm Café and picnic tables. It is the short option — an hour rather than an afternoon — and it works without driving anywhere.
Further onto the moor, with £5 all-day parking, forestry tracks, wild ponies around the edges and the East Dart running through it with places children swim in summer. The trees make it walkable on days when the open moor is not.
Access is free and unrestricted across most of Dartmoor, which is the real attraction. The practical limits are that the popular car parks fill early, there are no facilities at most of them, and the weather changes faster than visitors expect. Bright in Bovey does not mean bright on the moor.
The famous one: stunted oaks growing out of granite, every surface mossed over. It is about thirty minutes' walk in over rough ground with no marked path, and access is to the edge of the wood only — the moss is what people come for and it is what feet destroy.
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