Today, Dartmoor is a protected landscape and the DNP Authority have it within their mission to conserve its wildlife, heritage and beauty. But our ideas about what is beautiful, important and how best to manage land and landscapes have long been contested and fluid, as reflected in writing about the moor.
It was not until the 19th Century that Dartmoor, as a landscape, began to be appreciated as a source of beauty and place of leisure. Before this time, both the moor’s aesthetic and financial capital were rated as poor. We can frame the attitudes to Dartmoor at this time in terms of the scientific revolution, enlightenment thinking, and the grand tour – Dartmoor did not possess the vivid azure glamour of the Mediterranean, nor the soaring and awe inspiring beauty of the glaciers and mountains of the alps. It was a wasteland that science and engineering might empower man to ‘improve’, turning it from a barren wilderness to potential profit (just look at Thomas Tyrwhitt and his entrepreneurial exploits around Princetown from the late 18th Century).
Written descriptions about Dartmoor before the 19th Century are few and far between. The most commonly quoted early reference is to that made by the antiquarian John Leland, who wrote in the 1540s that ‘Dartmore is muche a wilde Morish and forest Ground’.
I much prefer the following longer piece that I came across. It reveals that attitudes about wasteland had not much changed at all by the close of the 18th Century.
‘But a mile or two from Moreton Hampstead, and entering the dreary boundaries of Dartmoor, we soon lose sight of all cultivation whatsoever. The Genius of this place wears a settled and eternal frown. Barren, rocky, savage, the wearied eye recoils from the waste; but the active mind yet urges it to roam along, to try if hill or dale can afford it one intervening charm to rest upon – but in vain – the lark was the only pleasing object I beheld, and his song was the more welcome, as being a sprightlier strain than I could hope to hear in so deserted and leafless a region.’
Mr S.E, (1789). ‘Description of a Tour through the West of England’, The Gentleman’s Magazine: and historical chronicle, Jun 1789; 59,6, pp518-519.
It makes me smile when the author writes ‘The Genius of this place wears a settled and eternal frown’ and that the ‘wearied eye recoils from the waste’. Try as he might, ‘Mr S.E.’ cannot find one redeeming feature in Dartmoor, save for a lark.
But different viewpoints on landscape would emerge in the 19th Century. Romanticism and early environmentalism brought greater subjectivity to landscape appreciation, and landscape began to be valued for more than purely economic reasons. It is within this context that a new relationship to the moor was born. This is no better exemplified than in Carrington’s Dartmoor poem of 1826. It is a very long work, so I won’t reproduce it here, but just contrast these opening lines with the extract quoted above:
Dartmoor! thou wert to me, in childhood’s hour,
A wild and wondrous region. Day by day
Arose upon my youthful eye they belt
Of hills mysterious, shadowy, clasping all
The green and cheerful landscape sweetly spread
Carrington, N.T. (1826) Dartmoor: A Descriptive Poem, John Murray, London.
Gentlemen writers were to follow – Rowe, Worth, Baring-Gould and Crossing – with their Victorian and Edwardian interests in geology, botany, antiquities, myth and folklore. Rather than seeing the moor as one large morass of dreary, useless sameness, these authors delighted in the spatial and temporal variations their walking, talking, collecting and digging revealed. However, it is important to remember that these were men of learning with sufficient income to allow them the luxury of having a leisured relationship with the moor. We do not know what ordinary folk thought, but I suspect they did not share these romantic and academic notions.
During the 20th Century up to the present day there has been both a proliferation and democratisation of publishing about Dartmoor. Spare time, aided by a variety of societal trends, and abetted by our access to personal transport, has meant that our relationship to the moor is now one primarily driven by leisure interests. This dictates how we use the moor, how we think about the moor, what we write about the moor, how we photograph the moor, and what we want for the future of the moor.
But in another 100 years, what will someone notice in publications about Dartmoor about how our connection has once again shifted? Will leisure, assisted by technology, remain dominant yet altered? How might transport technology change how we access the moor? Will new-environmentalism driven by climate change, see us demanding different things of our landscape? For example, we can already observe debates about the re-wilding of the moor for the purposes of carbon sequestration and biodiversity, such as through bog restoration, natural woodland afforestation and beaver colonisation. Will re-wilding alter our notions of wilderness and preservation , testing the concept of what it is we are preserving? Even the mere suggestion of changes in how we think about and manage the moor provokes emotional reactions, and reveals much about our relationship to the moor and what we value in it. Appreciating how attitudes to the moor have varied in the past are useful for contextualising, understanding, and challenging our current views about Dartmoor and accepting that this is always in flux.
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