I love landscape and I love Dartmoor. With a background in physical geography I have some understanding of geology, but a geologist I am not. I find mineral compositions, geological terminology, and geology’s buried strata, sometimes challenging to get my head around. That is why Josephine Collingwood’s new book – ‘Geology of Dartmoor: An Introduction to Dartmoor through Deep Time; its Geology, Tor Formation and Mineralogy’ – is so fantastic. Yes, Josephine knows her subject, but what makes this book so engaging and useful is her ability to communicate. The book adeptly handles the detail of Dartmoor’s geological history in a simple, yet not dumbed-down way. She provides explanations with clarity and uses abundant diagrams and annotated photographs to beautifully illustrate the concepts. All of this requires skill and effort – it is much easier to make something sound complicated than to make it sound straightforward! It has been fifty years…
Category: <span>Landscape and Geology</span>
In this blog I start pulling at the thread of the name Buckfast to reveal, through other place-name and landscape evidence, what I contend is an ancient Saxon deer park, previously uncommented upon. Discovering so many ‘clues’ was thrilling and just goes to show what amazing landscape histories are sitting in plain sight.
The morning haze gave the sky a bright grey luminescence which bounced its scattered rays off the green fields and the golden Molinia. The air was still near Wind Tor as I trod out to walk along the ridge of Hamel Down. The brown ground was bone dry and unyielding under my feet after another especially dry April. So much for drip, drip drop little April showers.
The story of British glaciation is devoid of nuance. It states that everything north of the ice sheet limit was glaciated, and everything south of it was not glaciated. But maybe Dartmoor was glaciated after all?
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