A NEW book detailing information about all of Dartmoor’s tors was launched on July 29 at the Dartmoor National Park Visitor Centre in Princetown, with money from sales going to help conservation work in the national park.
Have you ever gone for a walk on Dartmoor and wandered around aimlessly? Now, there is a new book about Dartmoor with over 700 professional photographs and informative facts about each of Dartmoor’s tors. It shows the reader how nearly every tor on Dartmoor is surrounded by an astonishing abundance of fascinating features and history.
Dartmoor Tors Compendium differs from all before it in that it brings together the features and history around each tor and presents them as a compendium of information, illustrated with evocative images that only a photographer can capture.
For every book sale, £2 goes to Donate for Dartmoor helping fund conservation work in the national park.
The book allows readers to explore Dartmoor with a new perspective, learn how Dartmoor was formed and why the tors are so distinctive, discover Dartmoor’s mineral wealth and find its mining sites, read the landscape to see how quarrymen have changed it, locate special features hidden in the landscape and enjoy the gritty beauty of Dartmoor’s tors through unalloyed photography.
The author, Josephine Collingwood, said: ‘Since the Ice Ages, when Dartmoor’s emergent tors were sculpted by ice and water, people have lived and worked upon its slopes. So much can still be seen today. Walking through this incredible landscape is like walking through time; you can still shelter in the homes of Bronze Age families whose contemporaries in Egypt were building the pyramids some 4,000 years ago, explore the workshops of medieval tinners and marvel at the ingenuity of Victorian mining engineers.
‘Dartmoor can be a very pretty place when the lighting is pretty. For this book, I challenged myself to produce exceptional photography for each tor, showing their characters through texture and form.’
Josephine is a professional photographer with a background in geophysics. Based near Tavistock, she has lived in and around Dartmoor National Park since 1983 and has a profound love of Dartmoor. She is also a qualified member of Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team Tavistock.
Go along to the book launch, meet the author, find out more about Donate for Dartmoor and talk to the author’s colleagues with Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team Tavistock.