As a boy growing up in Plymouth, I often found myself looking to the north-east, where the hills of Dartmoor rose, sometimes purple in the sunshine or wreathed in cloud, grey, mysterious and beckoning.

Needless to say, as soon as I could, I headed for those hills and discovered what William Crossing so aptly described as “the land of streams”.

At school, a friend and I established the Rambling Club and most weekends we took the No. 83 Western National bus to Yelverton or the Plymouth Corporation service No. 46 to Meavy.

If Sam was the conductor, he often “forgot” to take our fares! In those days, we seventeen year-olds didn't need a risk assessment to take a gang of unruly third formers into the “wild and wondrous region”!

For me, it was not only the streams but the leats of Dartmoor which fascinated me ... from Francis Drake's Plymouth Leat of 1591 to the many smaller watercourses supplying farms and powering mines and mills, and the thirty miles of leats flowing down to Devonport, they exerted a fascination which has never left me.

So it was inevitable that I felt the need to get it down on paper. It was nearly thirty years later that “Water From The Moor” appeared, telling the story of how my home city was able to quench its thirst with water from those distant hills.

One curious tradition I referred to in the book was The Fishing Feast, when once a year the civic dignitaries of Plymouth met at the headweir of Plymouth Leat to celebrate Drake's achievement and to raise glasses of pure Dartmoor water with the toast “May the descendants of him who brought us water never want wine”.

After this, trout were caught in the leat and served later at a grand supper. The headweir on the River Meavy is no more, drowned beneath the waters of Burrator Reservoir.