THIS BOOK IS ABOUT my perception of a landscape and what knowledge is needed as a foundation to that perception. The landscape in question is that of a compact, discrete, upland national park in Southwest England called Dartmoor and this is my interpretation of its anatomy and at least part of the spectrum of its inhabitants in the twenty-first century – fully acknowledging that there are many who know both better than me. This interpretation recognises that all things alive, natural and human (for we have for a long time drawn an artificial distinction between them) may contribute to that perception – but I do not dwell upon those things that have, or have had, little impact in the landscape itself. That we now know that moorland is for the most part a human imposition upon the upland, and has been maintained by graziers for some 5,000 years, means that the book necessarily involves itself with the contemporary state of that maintenance, its workforce, their difficulties and their would-be overseers.
I have written for the lay reader, mostly of the secular kind, and have used the language and terminology of whatever stage in the development of scientific thinking I have found most comfortable over my fifty-year intermittent observation of this singular hill. Scientific information and its language, shared for the most part between academic peers, seems to become increasingly abstruse. It is not always amenable to instant translation for the rest of us, and space for long and detailed explanation in a book like this is in short supply. None of this denies the need to delve into the far distant past, or helpful theory of any age, on the many occasions when a better understanding of things seen now is the purpose. Equally where good readable descriptions and explanations already exist I have seen no need to repeat the detail – they should be listed near the back of the book.
That said, there is a vast Dartmoor literature with a landscape reference and all that goes with it. It begins with the Domesday Book, but is then patchy for seven hundred years or so. It mushrooms as the nineteenth century progresses and gathers momentum through the twentieth. In the latter part of that century there is an interesting dichotomy. Scientific work on natural and archaeological detail on the one hand increases, and its publication matches its volume, however difficult it is to track down. On the other hand popular writing keeps pace volumetrically, partly because of its huge range: from serious amateur exploration of much moorland detail, through new editions of earlier classics such as the Crossing essays, to a multitude of later guides for walkers, riders and ‘letterbox’ hunters. (For the stranger: ‘letterboxes’, except the nineteenth century original at Cranmere Pool, lie hidden in thousands of locations and contain a rubber stamp whose imprint is the evidence for the success of the hunt.)
Between these two large literary branches runs a slim central procession of general Dartmoor ‘statements of their time’, for lack of a better definition. After the unique Domesday essay there is that long gap, but Samuel Rowe, in the Preface to his A Perambulation of the Forest of Dartmoor and its Venville Precincts in 1848, encapsulates the idea and thus really sets off my procession. He says: ‘within its [Dartmoor’s] limits there is enough to repay, not only the historian and antiquary but the scientific investigator for the task of exploring the mountain wastes of the Devonshire wilderness’. He goes on to point to tors ‘for the geologist’, Wistman’s Wood ‘for the botanist’ and the ‘aboriginal circumvallation of Grimspound’ for the antiquary. He does not neglect the economic activity evident on the Dartmoor of his day, but in the thrusting and somewhat innocent Victorian manner concentrates on cultivation and reclamation opportunity and regards common rights as an inhibition to logical ambition in the agricultural developer.
The modern sequence starts, I think, with Worth’s Dartmoor edited by Malcolm Spooner and the first New Naturalist Dartmoor by Harvey and St Leger Gordon, both published in 1953. Then the Devonshire Association published a volume of (scientific) Dartmoor Essays in 1964 edited by Ian Simmons. In 1970, Dartmoor a New Study, another set of essays, was edited by Crispin Gill. Harvey revised his New Naturalist volume in 1974 by adding two chapters; Eric Hemery’s High Dartmoor of 1983 deserves a place in this list despite its implied outer boundary and the 1992 Dartmoor Bibliography by Peter Hamilton-Leggett does too, though for very different reasons. It has 7,000 entries and thus saves me much space here! It must be apparent that I hope this book can take its place in that procession, though only the objective reader on the one hand and the Dartmoor generalist on the other can determine its fitness for such a place.
I am a Black Country boy, but I was introduced to Dartmoor in 1952, by my tutor at university, where I read geography. He, Gilbert Butland, was born in Dartmouth but his grandparents, who lived at Play Cross on the outskirts of Holne village above the gorge of the Double Dart, were commoners with grazing rights on Holne Moor. They, his great-grandparents and their immediate predecessors are all listed among the Homage in the book of presentments of the Court Baron. By strange chance and nearly 25 years later I became Steward of the Manor of Holne and wrote more presentments in that same 200-year-old book. Gilbert examined the book in my office when on leave from Australia in 1980. He was mightily pleased and wrote to say so when he got home. (He had left his Devon books with me when he emigrated in 1959.) For me a first Dartmoor circle was nicely closed.
Within that quarter century I taught geographers and ecologists on Dartmoor almost weekly from a field centre at Slapton in Start Bay, of which I was the first warden for a decade from 1959. From 1971, as the County Conservation Officer of Devon I had responsibility for the Warden and the Information Services of the Dartmoor National Park Committee and then in 1973 I became the first chief officer of the new National Park Authority (NPA). It was because the NPA bought Holne Moor and unintentionally became Lord of the Manor of Holne that I became its Steward. That involvement with the commoners on their patch was a huge benefit when the NPA was asked to help the Dartmoor Commoners’ Association seek an Act of Parliament to provide a better frame for the management of the commons of Dartmoor and legal public access to them. The Dartmoor Commons Act of 1985 was the climax of that process and established a precedent for upland commons management some 20 years before government got round to arranging it for all common land in the Commons act of 2006. From teaching about Dartmoor’s landscape to being charged with managing its public benefits and being allowed to work closely with the real managers of its plant cover and habitats was a whole procession of privilege.
The privilege didn’t end there. After an essay into Wales to set up and lead a new landscape and nature conservation agency – its Countryside Council – for five years, we returned to Dartmoor in what is euphemistically called retirement. From home in Moretonhampstead I led the Association of National Park Authorities as its Secretary General for another five years, which allowed comparisons with other national parks and with other hills to be more easily made. In 2001, the fifth year of that term, a national outbreak of foot and mouth disease reached Devon – and within that county, Dartmoor (as it did a number of other national parks). I was asked to chair a public inquiry into that outbreak, its handling and its aftermath in Devon, which brought me close to Dartmoor farmers once again. Three years later the Dartmoor Commoners’ Council, created by that Act of 1985 and thus then 19 years old, lost its long-serving chairman. To my complete surprise, members of the Council asked whether I would take that chair if they co-opted me. Was ever such an honour offered to someone who felt he already owed the landscape, which the Council oversees, so much? I readily accepted the chair, and so far, they claim, I have been useful to its members. A second Dartmoor circle neatly closed.
Despite spending three-quarters of my working life as a rural public servant, and it doubtless shows, I have always been a geographer. The attraction of true local geography is that it depends upon the wielding of a broad brush much of the time, but allows the display of intricate detail to illuminate corners of the canvas whenever necessary. I thus make no apology for the breadth of canvas I have tried to cover, but for the errors and omissions that Dartmoor experts will identify, I have to take full responsibility. That the landscape lives must not be forgotten as shapes and surfaces, flats and slopes, rocks and pebbles appear to dominate. The denizens of all corners of this National Park in all its ecological variety in their turn react to all those physical components of it whether they are springtails on the right slope in woodland leaf litter or farmers seeing cattle while evading bog pools on the high tops. The wholeness of this contemporary ecosystem is what this book is meant to be about, though it is merely a snapshot in the 280 million years on the record.
Its reader, especially the stranger to the Moor or even the casual visitor, will find it invaluable to have a map at their elbow, for identifying every location mentioned in the text on a map within the book would take up many pages at an adequate scale. I have tried to ensure that the reader knows where to look from the descriptions, but I am well aware that this may not be a foolproof formula. The Ordnance Survey’s Explorer OL 28 at 1:25,000 covers the greater part of the National Park, in two halves, on either side of the same sheet (the well off might have two copies and avoid continual turning over and refolding as part of the reference exercise). Even then adjacent sheets are needed to cover the extreme eastern and western edges of the Park. The British Geological Survey’s three 1:50,000 sheets named Ivybridge 349, Dartmoor Forest 338 and Okehampton 324, also cover the bulk of the Park but Exeter and Newton Abbot are needed to complete the eastern edge, and Brentor and the north end of Roborough Down slip off the western margin of the Forest sheet.
Many people have helped me over the last five years especially, while the writing has continued, though disrupted by many a meeting and latterly photographic weather too good to miss. I hope I will miss no one out of the next few lines.
All the maps and diagrams are the ultimate work of an exceptional cartographer, Hanno Koch, who has translated my sketches, aerial photographs, the original Vision map by Fiona Waldon and the other two more elderly vegetation maps (Fig. 79) into what you see here. Professor Charles Tyler, almost a denizen of Holne Moor himself, has provided most of the animal images and a number of ‘landscapes’ – Dart Valley and Wistman’s Wood interior for instance. Tracey Elliot-Reep and Chris Chapman, two of Dartmoor’s better-known image makers have both provided ‘farmers at work’ pictures. The skills of these three show among the bulk of the rest, which are my own.
My successor chief officers of the NPA, Nick Atkinson and Kevin Bishop, have allowed me continuous access to the library, the maps and the aerial photographs at Parke. There, Norman Baldock and Debbie Griffith have provided photographs and advice, Kerenza Townsend and David Partridge have shared their IT technical skills with me and others on the book’s behalf
Tess Walker, archivist extraordinary by any other name, has never failed to come up with the necessary reference. Gordon Clark and Tina Ainsley of the Environment Agency helped me to understand better the Dartmoor freshwater regimes and its rainfall, as did Gary Cox on my home patch.
Conversations with Professor Ian Simmons of Durham, Dan Charman and Ralph Fyfe of Plymouth, and especially their writings, brought my palaeo-ecology more up to date, and reminded me of discussions with Andrew Fleming, the king of Bronze Age Reaves, as he excavated on Holne Moore in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Photographs I took at the time are in Chapter 3. I have stuck with Ian’s generalised pollen diagram of 1964 for our purposes in the same chapter, and apologise to the others for not illustrating their detailed and very recent work. Lack of appropriate space is the excuse. Richard Scrivener, then of the British Geological Survey’s Exeter office, talked to me about the latest geological thinking around the granite, and the explosive ruthlessness of earlier experts preparing faces for imminent inspection by conference attendees. David Streeter has been my ecological mentor throughout, and as editor has helped enormously with the central chapters. To all these friendly scientists I am very grateful, for forbearance as well as for information.
There are some who have worked around the Moor at the fringe of farming who have unknowingly helped me as we have talked: Karen Aylward, Simon Bates and Eamon Crowe, all now of Natural England, John Loch of DE and John Waldon, once of the RSPB and prime arranger of the Dartmoor Vision for 2030. They all have tricky jobs. Colin Sturmer and Chris Gregory of the Duchy of Cornwall have given more help than they may realise. James Paxman of the Dartmoor Preservation Association and Tom Greeves of the Dartmoor Society have both helped me and both will know why I should list Lady Sayer here, for when calm, relaxed and not in Joan of Arc mode she was happy to share an immense knowledge of her father’s Grand Old Moor with conservation striplings like me.
It remains to thank all those who actually manage the Dartmoor landscape, for sometimes just the odd word, or the clarification of things inadequately observed. Among them are those I must name, some to acknowledge time readily given for longer and focused conversation. Colin Abel and his father Cyril, Layland Branfield, Anton Coaker, Phillip and Christine Coaker, Arnold Cole who also took me to Blacklane Brook where Ian Simmons worked, John Hodge who showed me detail on Okehampton Hamlets and Belstone Common in the 1980s, John Jordan from Gidleigh, Brian Lavis of Sourton Common, Michael and Rosemary Mudge (whom we have just lost), Martin Perryman, David Powell, Foreman of the Homage of Holne, Maurice Retallick, John Shears. They have all given me wise counsel, and will know why I must also register here the Dartmoor debt I owe to the late Herbert Whitley.
For the mistakes, errors and misinterpretations only I am to blame, but read on and ignore them if they don’t interrupt the story.