Dartmoor's Alluring Uplands

A striking and famous feature of the English landscape, Dartmoor is a beautiful place, with a sense of wildness and mystery. This book provides a new perspective on an important aspect of Dartmoor’s past. Its focus is transhumance: the seasonal transfer of grazing animals to different pastures.

In the Middle Ages, intensive practical use was made of Dartmoor’s resources. Its extensive moorlands provided summer pasture for thousands of cattle from the Devon lowlands, which flowed in a seasonal tide, up in the spring and down in the autumn. This book describes, for the first time, the social organisation and farming practices associated with this annual transfer of livestock. It also presents evidence for a previously unsuspected Anglo-Saxon pattern of transhumance in which lowland farmers spent the summers living with their cattle on the moor.

Winner of the Devon Book of the Year Award 2013.

Author Biography

The late Harold Fox was born and brought up in South Devon, and was Professor of Social and Landscape History at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester. He was a recognised authority on late-medieval landscape, agrarian and social history, particularly in the South-West and Midlands, and had served as president of the Medieval Settlement Research Group, chairman of the Society for Landscape Studies, vice-president of the English Place-Names Society and president of the Devon History Society.

Sadly he died before completing the final stages of this book, but two colleagues from the University of Leicester’s Centre for English Local History have brought it to the point of publication.

Matthew Tompkins is Honorary Visiting Fellow at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester. Christopher Dyer is Emeritus Professor at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester.