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Aspects Of Dartmoor

Fishing the Teign

Due to their very nature the rivers of Dartmoor have been the ideal habitats for salmon and trout.  Such a rich harvest provided many of the riverside landowners with an income as too the local businesses who profited from the visiting anglers. Certainly by the late 1800s virtually every hotel, …

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The Hated Landowner

WHO IS POSSIBLY THE MOST HATED LANDOWNER IN BRITAIN TODAY? – In 2011 Alexander Darwall, a hedge fund manager of Devon Equity Management purchased the 4,000 acre Blatchford Estate on Dartmoor in 2001 which then made him Dartmoor’s sixth largest landowner. Along with Blatchford Estate Darwall also owns the 16,000 …

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Tavistock’s Water Cart

Dartmoor is infamous for it’s quaking bogs and impenetrable mists and fogs but not that long ago there was another peril – dust – or to use the Devonshire vernacular ‘pillum’. This was the scourge of many a town and village street, especially during the hot and windy summertime. The …

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Dartmoor Walls

Two things Dartmoor is not short of – granite and walls and both make an integral ‘marriage’ in its landscape. What follows is some anonymous persons’ viewpoint from 1884 on the Walls of Dartmoor. Today many of what they describe can still be seen on and around the moor today.  …

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Phillpott’s Taverns

Taverns and Inns have for centuries been part of Dartmoor’s heritage, some located in towns and villages and others in remote spots of the moor. Each one very much individual in its character and its regular customers, all with a tale to tell. Eden Phillpotts wrote many of his stories …

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Affluent or Effluent

At the Devon Quarter Assizes in the April of 1881 and interesting appeal was heard pertaining to a leat and whether or not it should be regarded as a tributary of the River Dart. Firstly what can be considered as a Dartmoor Leat? In simple Dartmoor terms Eric Hemery defined …

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Silver Foxes

Although a very contentious topic today the wearing of animal fur had for centuries been very much a fashion statement. Silver fox fur was amongst the most prized and popular kind, hardly any special social occasion would happen without the fur being worn as a fashion statement. If you read …

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Highwaymen of Dartmoor

  Today we have ‘mugging’ and ‘carjacking’ just over one hundred years ago both were classified as ‘highway robbery’. Today the thieves are after mobile phones, credit cards, cars etc. then they were robbing watches, cash, horses etc. Such villains thrived on and around the lonely highways and byways of …

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Dartmoor Improver

During the 1800s some landowners were of the belief that Dartmoor could produce lucrative crops and began an era of ‘improving’ the land. One of the early pioneers of this idea was Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt who advocated the growing of flax on his Tor Royal estate. Another such man was …

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White Nights 1924

Every now and then nature transforms Dartmoor into a spectacle of shimmering ice and frost which coats literally everything in a mantle of glistening ice crystals, on the moor this is known as ‘The Ammil’. This phenomenon occasionally occurs in other parts of the country but is normally regarded as …

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