David J. Hawkings

David J. Hawkings grew up in Plymouth looking north-east to the hills of Dartmoor, and as a schoolboy ran a Rambling Club with a friend, taking the bus out to Yelverton and Meavy most weekends to explore what William Crossing called "the land of streams." It was Dartmoor's leats that fascinated him most, from Francis Drake's 1591 Plymouth Leat to the smaller watercourses feeding farms, mines and mills. That fascination led him to research and write Water from the Moor (1987), the history of how Plymouth drew its water supply from Dartmoor, and an earlier article, "The Early Water Supply of Plymouth," published in The Devon Historian in 1982.

David also hosts Myths of the Moor, a podcast exploring Dartmoor's supernatural stories and folklore, with his son Simon.

He wrote about his own Dartmoor journey, and the leats that inspired his book, in In the Footsteps of Francis Drake for the Our Dartmoor journal.

Works

• Water from the Moor (1987)
• Myths of the Moor (podcast)