Historical Figures

Aileen Fox (Lady Fox)

Exeter

Archaeologist (1907-2005) who excavated the Round Pound at Kestor in 1951-52 and published the results in 1955.

Anna Eliza Bray

Victorian author (1790-1883) who lived in Tavistock and wrote one of the earliest full accounts of Dartmoor's folklore and antiquities, in a series of letters to the poet Robert Southey.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a Scottish-born doctor and writer, best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. In 1901 he spent a fortnight walking Dartmoor with journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, researching what became The Hound of the Baskervilles, the only Holmes story set on a real, named moor.

Benjamin Gayer

Okehampton

Real 17th-century mayor of Okehampton whose misappropriation of a sailors' ransom fund grew, over five Victorian retellings, into the "Benjie Geare" devil legend of Cranmere Pool.

Bertram Fletcher Robinson

Bertram Fletcher Robinson (1870-1907) was a Devon-born journalist and editor who grew up on the edge of Dartmoor. In 1901 he told fellow writer Arthur Conan Doyle the moorland legends that became The Hound of the Baskervilles, and guided him around the moor while Doyle researched the book, which Doyle dedicated to him.

Brother Adam (Karl Kehrle)

Buckfastleigh

Benedictine monk (1898-1996) and beekeeper at Buckfast Abbey, who bred the Buckfast bee and set up an isolated mating station on Dartmoor in 1925.

Dinah Tuckett

Two Bridges

Keeper of Dunnabridge Pound for over 50 years, presented to Edward VIII in 1936. The shelter inside the pound is known as Dinah's Chair.

Dr Thomas Blackall

Ashburton

Thomas Blackall (1814 to 1899), an Exeter physician who bought Spitchwick in 1867, rebuilt the house and had the carriage drive made that still carries his name.

Eden Phillpotts

English author of the Dartmoor Cycle, eighteen novels of the moor (1862-1960).