Sylvia Sayer

Sylvia Rosalind Pleadwell Sayer, Lady Sayer (1904-2000), was chairman of the Dartmoor Preservation Association from 1951 to 1973, and remained its patron, attending almost every executive committee meeting, until 1999. Her grandfather Robert Burnard, who with Sabine Baring-Gould carried out the first scientific excavations of Dartmoor antiquities including Grimspound, had been a founding member of the DPA in 1883. In 1928 Sylvia and her husband Guy Sayer, a Royal Navy officer later knighted on his retirement as a vice-admiral, bought Old Middle Cator, a derelict longhouse near Widecombe-in-the-Moor, where she lived for the rest of her life.

As DPA chairman she fought a string of major battles for the moor: against a television transmitting mast on North Hessary Tor (a public inquiry was held in 1953, but the mast went ahead in 1954); against military live-firing exercises, personally interrupting a mock battle at Ringmoor Down in 1967 to protect grazing animals and ancient monuments; against the proposed Swincombe reservoir, rejected by Parliament in 1970; against the Meldon reservoir, which was built in 1972 despite her 62-page booklet The Meldon Story setting out the case against it; and against china clay companies' plans to tip spoil across the archaeologically rich Shaugh Moor. The Times described her in 1971 as "a militant conservationist, who is a full-time thorn in the sides of those authorities and others who want to flood, fence, dig up, knock down and otherwise damage the Dartmoor national park," and Crispin Gill, introducing Dartmoor - A New Study in 1970, called her indefatigable, repeating fellow campaigner Henry Slesser's description of her as "the shield of the moor."

Sylvia Sayer died in January 2000. Her thanksgiving service at Widecombe-in-the-Moor parish church drew over 300 people, including representatives of the Dartmoor National Park Authority, the Council for National Parks and the Ramblers' Association. On the centenary of her birth in 2004, John Bainbridge, then the DPA's chief executive, launched a memorial programme in her name: annual walks to parts of Dartmoor she had helped save, and an annual Sylvia Sayer lecture.