The British landscape has been a central theme of the New Naturalists library since its inception and was given early expression by volumes devoted to individual national parks. The tradition was initiated by Snowdonia sub-titled The National Park of North Wales, and published in 1949, the same year as the Act of Parliament that established the parks came into being. Dartmoor was created a national park in 1951 and two years later we published Professor L. A. Harvey’s and D. St. Leger-Gordon’s Dartmoor as number 27 in the series. Over the next 25 years this ran to three editions and several reprints.
At the time our predecessors wrote that, ‘the competing claims of national defence, water-supply, mineral working, afforestation, hill sheep-farming, public recreation and nature conservation which affect so many of the remoter parts of Britain are here all concentrated in one compact area in the heart of a single county.’ Today, more than 30 years later, these are still burning issues and all feature prominently in the present volume. However, it is also the case that much has changed and the fruits of new research and a changing political and social environment pointed to the need for a fresh and updated approach to the area.
Professor Mercer is uniquely qualified for this task. As he writes in his Foreword, he has had a long association with the moor since first being introduced to it as an undergraduate in the early 1950s. In 1973, he became the first chief officer of the new Dartmoor National Park Authority, a post that he held for the next 17 years, and he is now chairman of the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council. Not only that, but he is one of the country’s foremost authorities on national parks and countryside conservation. For five years he was chief executive of the newly formed Countryside Council for Wales and on returning home to Dartmoor was appointed secretary-general of the Association of National Park Authorities.
If all of this sounds like the CV of a typical high-flying bureaucrat, the truth, as the reader will soon discover, is different. Ian Mercer is a geographer and naturalist at heart, never happier than when revealing the secrets of a landscape to a party of entranced and riveted students from the pulpit of a convenient Dartmoor tor or educating the nation on radio from the vantage of a hot air balloon. This is an intensely personal account, written with passion, authority and understanding and in a style that anyone familiar with the author will instantly recognise.
In the preface to the third edition of the original Dartmoor, the authors acknowledge assistance from, among others, a Mr Ian Mercer. With this book another of Ian Mercer’s Dartmoor circles has been neatly closed.