Tag Archives: Dartmoor

“By day the place was inviting enough and a child wouldn’t have feared to be there. Dean Burn came down from its cradle far away in the hills and threaded Dean Woods with ripple and flash and song. The beck lifted its voice in stickles and shouted over the mossy …

“On the very edge Of the vast moorland, startling every eye, A shape enormous rises! High it towers Above the hill’s bold brow, and seen from far, Assumes the human form; a granite god, – To whom in days long flown, the suppliant knee In trembling homage bowed. The hamlets …

Many years ago, before the social services were invented, there lived a woman at a small place called Brinning. She lived in the small cot with her small baby, the father had left to work in the mines. On this particular day mother and baby were out in the garden …

Vaccinium mrytillus, in Scotland they call it a blaeberry, in Wales it is known as a whimberry, in Devon they talk of whortleberry on Dartmoor ‘tiz a ‘hurt‘. Call it what you want it tastes delicious and it is a chore to pick, you seem to spend hours plucking, squashing …

“About them stretched square fields, off some of which a harvest of oats had just been shorn; while others were grass green with the sprawling foliage of turnip.” Falcon Farm – Orphan Diana, Eden Phillpotts For anyone that has seen the now famous Warhorse movie they will recall the Dartmoor …

Summer is the time of year when you can return from a day out on Dartmoor and find you have one or more uninvited hitch hikers firmly attached to your person. Depending on how soon you discover them they can appear as a small, spider-like insect or as a reddish …

  “The great, solitary rowan-tree did much good, for it gave a welcome shade to the cattle and the traveller ; it broke the line of the level fiat gratefully, it offered pleasure to the eye at bud-break and sparkled with bunches of scarlet fruit in the autumn, which both …

“Through grass, through amber’d cornfields, our slow Stream– Fringed with its flags and reeds and rushes tall, And Meadowsweet, the chosen of them all By wandering children, yellow as the cream Of those great cows–winds on as in a dream By mill and footbridge, hamlet old and small (Red roofs, …

The woodcock now upon the wing Is flitting past to upland spring; The fern owl wheels above the brake, The heron screams from yonder lake; The Dart is moaning down the dell, Like music from a muffled bell. Edward William Lewis Davies – 1863 Quite often you can be strolling …

“I greet, as severing mists its spire reveal, The ringing anvil and the whirling wheel; Here, where they urge their labours, there relax, The panting girls that ply the fervent flax.“ Linum usitatissimum or Flax to use its common names is one of the oldest fibre crops known to man, …