Our Dartmoor started life as a zine: an attempt to bring together people with a shared connection to the moor, regardless of their particular corner of it. Two editions later, the idea had outgrown what a zine could hold, and it eventually became this. A directory at first, because that was the useful, buildable thing. But the directory was always meant to be a start, not the destination.
It always felt like it should be much more. The problem is, you can claim a thing before it exists (well, you can, but you have to be wealthy or well know or both - or deluded).
So, now the website has almost 3000 listings (of vastly different types) several attempts to draw together rather varied sources and some madly disparate data. It's time to be more open about the ultimate goal of this website.
The website needs to be a hub for anything Dartmoor - and I mean anything.
What's already here
The directory itself has grown a long way past a list of businesses. Alongside it there's now a genuine record of Dartmoor's heritage: tors, stone circles, cairns and ancient monuments, cross-checked against real sources rather than copied from one another. There's Myths & Legends, retelling the moor's folklore with an eye on where each story actually came from. There's a growing shelf of Dartmoor writing in Publications, working toward a proper bibliography. And there are the maps: rivers and waterways, wild camping, firing times, historic maps you can fade back through a century, sun and golden hour for planning a shoot, and a LiDAR view that shows hut circles and reaves hiding under the heather.
Is it perfect? no. Is it ever going to be? probably not - but if you read my other article about the reasons for building the wesbite in the first place, you'll see that these things are not very high on my priority list!
None of that happened because it was planned as a grand structure from day one. It happened because each piece turned out to be worth building properly once it existed at all.
It's very much an evolving structure all of it's own. Unconstrained by deadlines and committees and budget restraints (There's no budget - end of conversation) I'm watching this happen in real time - spotting something that needs to be part of the whole and finding a few spare hours to bodge together a way of building it.
What's coming next
A few directions worth naming:
- Collections that cross categories. Right now everything sits in its own type: business, heritage, route, place. Some of the most interesting things about Dartmoor cut straight across those lines: a stream, a ruin, a pub and the road between them; the people who worked with granite; places you can reach without a car. Editorial collections like these would let the site tell those stories without inventing a new category for each one.
- Showing what's nearby, not just what's related. A heritage site might genuinely connect to a route, a river, a book, a local business and a piece of folklore, not just other things of the same type. Making those real connections visible would make the size of the site easier to actually explore.
- Routes worth trusting. Turning a walk from "a line on a map" into something with the practical detail that actually helps: surface, access, parking, when it was last checked.
- Historical Dartmoor People. A strand for the people behind the moor's written history: Baring-Gould, William Crossing, Mary Maria Colling and others, seeded from what's documented and built out properly over time.
- A "then and now" layer. Historic map overlays and old photographs on the places that have genuinely changed, starting with a handful of the richest examples rather than trying to historicise every listing at once.
Where the record still has gaps
How you can help it grow
None of this works as one person's list of ideas. The things that have made the directory genuinely useful so far, corrections, photographs, a memory attached to a place, a business we'd missed, have all come from people who know a corner of the moor better than I do. If any of the above sounds like something you'd want to help with, or you've spotted a gap only you would know about, I'd love to hear from you.
There a obvious gaps in some of the data and I'm working to fill those gaps as quickly as I can, but I need people to get involved (you'll not be put to work, I promise! Just send me links, or write me an article - everything is welcome.
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