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…
A Walk in English Weather Posts
Searching out landscapes different to my Dartmoor home, in this blog I explore Lincolnshire – a landscape influenced by north sea transgressions and regressions of ice, sea, people and trade.
A necessity to visit the outskirts of the city sparked a walk, in territory I wouldn’t normally think to walk – rural spaces in the city. North Plymouth is particularly endowed with woodlands in its steep valleys, which provide important corridors and habitats for both nature and people.
In this blog I finish the route over Dartmoor, between Tavistock Abbey and Buckfast Abbey, two monasteries founded in the late Saxon. This final section revealed: churches built for the glory of God separated by over a millennia of time; caves full of pre-historic fauna; an individual who, even in death seemed to provoke fear in the local population; and elite hunting Saxons, enjoying the sport of the Buckfast landscape.
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.
Born to parents who had moved from Carlisle, my grandmother Christiana’s first couple of years was spent in south Manchester, in the 1910s. Their stay here was brief, but the family connection to the area had been made. In this blog I explore the Gorton and Openshaw landscape with my focus on the Edwardian era and the places that my relatives would have known, a landscape more nuanced than the industrial city stereotype I had anticipated.
With my recent contemplations of the river Tavy in the context of the history of British rivers, I began wondering what all this meant for the stages of development of the town of Tavistock. In this blog I use a hydrological perspective to explore, what I hope is an informed speculation, that the original Saxon abbey may not lie under the remains of the abbey as we see them today, but on slightly higher ground north of the floodplain.
In walking this third leg of my journey, on the monastic way between Tavistock and Buckfast, I wonder if, in order to experience this route as it would have in the past, I should actually be on horseback, as previous ‘elite’ or jobbing workers would have done. In exploring this way, I am learning more of its deeper roots, to a Saxon and maybe even earlier prehistoric past, pre-dating its Christian use and the imprint that the crosses leave in the current landscape. Along the way this crossing of Dartmoor reveals that one of the great Dartmoor legends – that of Childe the Hunter – may not just be historic hyperbole.
Rivers feel like a very natural part of our landscape yet they are far more altered than many people think. A great deal of river change happened in the medieval, as valleys floors became blanketed in sediment, altering floodplains and river channel forms – all of which had consequences for medieval settlement, communications, farming and industry.
This is the final installment of my Lich Way trilogy. I finally get to Lydford and the focus of all the attention, the graveyard and the burial of bodies. On completing my walk, I end up wondering if the Lich Way is really ‘a route’ at all.
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