Dartmoor People

Paul Rendell - Dartmoor Guide

Paul Rendell was born in Plymouth and became enthusiastic about Dartmoor from an early age after being taken on numerous outings by his parents. Burrator and Sheepstor were two of the favourite places they went as a family.Very early he found he was fascinated by the moor's industrial archaeology and its wildlife. Because he was dyslexic his schooldays were not very easy for him but he struggled on until school leaving age.

Richard Crafus

The Black prisoner-leader, usually identified with "King Dick," whose self-governing block at Dartmoor Prison ran its own theatre, boxing school and gambling operation in 1814-1815.

Richard Nicholls Worth

Shaugh Prior, Plymouth

Plymouth journalist, geologist and historian (1837-1896), author of histories of Devonport, Plymouth and Devon.

Robert Cyril Layton Perkins

Newton Abbot

British entomologist known in Hawaii as the "Father of Hawaiian Zoology" (Linnean Medal 1912, FRS 1920), who retired to south Devon in 1912 and, according to specimen records, spent part of his later years collecting moths at Hexworthy and Lustleigh on Dartmoor's eastern edge.

Robert Heckford

Retired solicitor and moth researcher whose decades of work on the life histories of small moths led to a species, Ectoedemia heckfordi, being named after him.

Sabine Baring-Gould

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

Simon Dell

Former Tavistock police officer, MBE, and founder of Moorland Guides and the Dartmoor Walking Festival, who has written more than 20 books on Dartmoor's history and heritage.

Simon Tozer

Devon novelist and non-fiction author whose fiction and Swim, Walk & History guides are inspired by Dartmoor's legends and rivers.

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.