Dartmoor is an amazing place – rugged, challenging, big sky, squelchy, cold, windy, dramatic, changeable. As part of my next novel, A Bag of Blood and Bone, is set in Dartmoor I felt I should get to know this dangerous moor better. So, I’ve walked bits of it and experienced its weather, geology, vegetation and environment.
The great forces of the earth; volcanoes, earthquakes, tectonic plate movement and erosion forces such as water and wind, have shaped Dartmoor for millions of years. It has been beneath the sea, lifted up to form land, then eroded back to the water line, then crushed between great movements of mountains, again and again. All this has created a geologically rich environment and distinctive landscape. Granite is the signature rock found on Dartmoor. The Tors (rocky outcrops) are all places where granite pokes up through other rocks and the soil, in defiance of its impassive, inexorable nature.
It’s a place that has been shaped by humans for thousands of years, yet now it is a recognised wild place. In the Bronze Age (think 2,000 – 1,000 years BC), agricultural man colonised the area, extending the impact from Stone Age man. At that time Dartmoor’s climate was warm and dry after the last ice age. These first agriculturists cleared forests, cropped the land and thereby weakened the fragile soil. Iron Age colonists kept more to the edges of the moor, probably because the climate worsened from about 500BC onwards. Saxons kept to the same pattern, and they set much of the historic layout of settlements in Devon.
Tin mining was important in Dartmoor from mediaeval times to the end of the seventeenth century. Mining became important again in the nineteenth century – but this time for copper, tungsten, iron and silver. That industry has now passed into history, too. Today Dartmoor is a working agricultural landscape with its own community and population of knowledgeable locals. Plus, it is a magnet for those who want to escape from the city to roam a wild land and feel nature’s sharp claws.
