Historical Figures

Sabine Baring-Gould

The squire-parson of Lew Trenchard and prolific chronicler of Dartmoor and Devon (1834-1924).

Sir Edward Pellew, Viscount Exmouth

Christow

Royal Navy officer (1757-1833) who led the 1816 bombardment of Algiers and bought the Canonteign estate on Dartmoor's eastern edge in 1812. He is buried at Christow.

Sir Edwin Lutyens

Drewsteignton

British architect (1869-1944) who designed Castle Drogo for Julius Drewe, built 1911-1930 at about a third of his original plan.

Sir Francis Drake

Tavistock

Elizabethan naval commander and the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe (1577-1580), born around 1540 at Crowndale Farm near Tavistock and later the owner of Buckland Abbey, on Dartmoor's southern edge.

Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt

Princetown

MP and Duchy of Cornwall official (1762-1833) who built Tor Royal and pushed for Princetown, Dartmoor Prison and the Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway.

Sylvia Sayer

Widecombe-in-the-Moor

Chairman of the Dartmoor Preservation Association from 1951 to 1973, and its most formidable conservation campaigner, fighting off a TV mast, military exercises, reservoirs and china clay expansion across the moor.

Theo Brown

Devonshire Association folklore recorder whose decades of Dartmoor fieldwork produced woodcuts, maps and a museum object alongside her written record of the moor's traditions.

William Crossing

Victorian topographer and antiquary (1847-1928), the single most prolific chronicler of Dartmoor, author of the classic Guide to Dartmoor and a dozen other books on the moor.

John Dunning, 1st Baron Ashburton

Ashburton

Ashburton-born lawyer John Dunning (1731 to 1783), Solicitor General and Lord Ashburton, who bought the Spitchwick lease in about 1769 and built his Dartmoor house there.