Dartmoor is one of the wettest places in southern England. Moist Atlantic air is forced up over the high granite moor, cools, and falls as rain, so the heart of the moor can receive well over two metres of rain a year while the lowlands around it stay far drier. These maps show both the long record and what is falling right now.
Open the rainfall history map → Open the live rainfall map →
How wet is Dartmoor?
The high moor is one of the wettest places in England. Princetown, near the centre of the moor at over 400 metres, averages around 2,169 millimetres of rain a year, roughly two and a half times the England average. Drop down to the sheltered valleys and market towns around the edge and the totals fall away sharply, so a single small upland can hold a striking range of climates.
Why Dartmoor is so wet
The moor is a high dome of granite standing in the path of the prevailing south-westerly winds. As damp Atlantic air meets it, the land forces the air to rise. Rising air cools, and cool air cannot hold as much moisture, so it condenses into cloud and falls as rain. This is called orographic rainfall, and it is why the wettest ground is the exposed high moor and its west-facing slopes, which take the weather first.
A century of rainfall records
The rainfall history map draws on Met Office rain-gauge records reaching back to the early twentieth century, many from gauges that have since closed. Each gauge is sized and shaded by its average annual rainfall, and clicking one opens its whole record: every year's total, the wettest and driest years, the wettest single day, and the shape of the seasons.
What the records show
Wet years and dry years, the long rhythm of the seasons, and just how much more rain the high moor receives than the land around it. It is a picture of Dartmoor's climate built one year at a time.
Rain right now
The live rainfall map shows recent rain at the Environment Agency's gauges across and around the moor, sized and shaded by the total over the last seven days. In a dry spell most gauges sit near zero, which is a story in itself. Click any gauge for a day-by-day chart of the last twenty-eight days.
Why it matters
Rain is the engine of Dartmoor. It feeds the rivers that rise here and run to both coasts, it keeps the blanket bog and the peat alive, and it shapes what can grow and graze on the moor. Watching where and when the rain falls is a way of reading the whole living system. See the full Our Dartmoor map →
Rainfall history from Met Office MIDAS Open data; live rainfall from the Environment Agency. Both are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Figures are provisional and for general interest, not for planning or safety decisions. Our Dartmoor is a community project built with the help of AI.
