Connections
Dartmoor doesn't keep its stories to itself. Granite cut from a quarry near Princetown ended up holding up Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, facing a king's statue in the City of London, and forming a bridge that was later taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt in the Arizona desert. None of that happened by accident, and all of it can be traced: who quarried the stone, who leased the ground, which firm shipped it, which route it travelled to get off the moor.
Connections is where those threads get followed properly, from a specific place, object or person on or near Dartmoor out to wherever the evidence actually leads. The quarry workers, contractors and business partnerships behind a piece of stone are often as interesting as the famous landmark it ended up in, and usually less well known. The aim is to tell that fuller story using sources that can be checked, not the version that has simply been repeated often enough to sound true. The real connections tend to be more interesting than anything invented to fill the gaps.
Every place, business and person named in a Connections piece links through to its own listing in the directory. A piece isn't just something to read once and move on from. It's a way into the directory from a different direction, showing how the things listed here relate to each other and to a much wider world.
- The Hound of The Baskervilles and how it found it's way off Dartmoor In the summer of 1901, a doctor-turned-novelist checked into the Duchy Hotel in Princetown with fourteen miles of moor still in his boots. He was there to writ…
- Where Dartmoor's Granite Went Dartmoor's granite didn't stay on the moor. Stone quarried at Foggintor and Haytor travelled to a naval hero's column in London, a breakwater guarding Plymouth…
