Robert Burnard

Robert Burnard (1848-1920) was a Plymouth chemical manufacturer with a second career in Dartmoor archaeology. He was senior partner in Burnard and Alger, fertiliser makers, and chaired the Cattewater Harbour Commission. His father, Charles Frederick Burnard, was Mayor of Plymouth in 1881-82.

He joined the Devonshire Association in 1887, the year of his first antiquarian paper, and was its President in 1911. He became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1900, wrote nine papers for the Association's Transactions, and contributed the "Early Man" chapter to the Victoria History of the County of Devon (1906).

The Dartmoor Preservation Association was set up in 1883 and Burnard was its first secretary. In its first year he persuaded the War Department not to fire on the Okehampton range on Saturdays. Sources call him a founder, a co-founder and the first secretary, depending on who is writing.

From 1894 to 1906 he worked with Sabine Baring-Gould and others on the Dartmoor Exploration Committee, which dug and recorded hut circles, stone rows and cairns across the moor. In 1893 the two of them re-erected stones at the Challacombe stone row, and in 1894 he published a paper on the hut circles at Broadun Ring.

He is credited with overseeing the 1909 restoration of the Grey Wethers circles, where nine stones stood in the north circle and seven in the south before the work. At Brisworthy stone circle, restored the same year, he was present at times, but the restoration is credited to the Rev. H. H. Breton. The 1901 excavation report for Cranbrook Castle is credited to Baring-Gould, and the sources found do not say what Burnard's part in it was.

He was also a photographer. His Dartmoor Pictorial Records is a photographic survey of the moor (Wikisource dates it to 1894), and his photographs are held in the Dartmoor Trust archive. He lived for about seven years at Huccaby House on the West Dart, and later at Stoke-in-Teignhead and Torquay. Sources disagree on where he was born and died: Wikidata gives Maker in Cornwall and Liskeard, while the Devonshire Association's entry ends with him at Torquay.

Richard Hansford Worth, the committee's secretary, has his own listing: R. Hansford Worth.

Image: The Devonshire Association.