DARTMOOR
Dartmoor is beautiful, wild, and full of incredible places to explore. The granite that forms it was produced, in the depths of the earth, over 300 million years ago, and humankind has shaped it over the last 10,000 years. Together, they have made Dartmoor into a wonderful landscape, full of varied habitats, from wooded valleys and haymeadows to magnificent mires and the wild open moor. It may look like a natural, wild place but, if you look more closely, you can see traces of past lives etched into the land itself.
People have been using the moor for over 10,000 years, and you can see the signs of those who have settled here, farmed the land, and dug for resources such as tin, iron, silver and granite, if you look closely. We know that people were visiting Dartmoor, to hunt, over 10,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until about 4,500 years ago, that people began to settle down in large numbers, to farm the land.These first farmers settled in upland Dartmoor because it would have been more open than the heavily wooded valleys below. They would have had to clear dense thickets of alder and hazel before they could start farming the land, with nothing more than simple hand tools.
Dartmoor’s landscape is dominated by rocks. Granite is the main rock type and can be seen in many dramatic outcrops (tors) and on boulder-strewn slopes. The granite was formed around 280 million years ago thrusting upwards under older rocks into the area we now know as Devon and Cornwall. Over a very long time, the overlying rocks have been eroded by nature to expose the granite beneath and shape the moor we see today. These processes have produced the soils and conditions to which certain wild plants are particularly suited.
