The Outline of Dartmoor's Story

• Author and illustrator: Sylvia Sayer
• Printed: S. T. Elson of Ashburton, 1951
• Price on the cover: two shillings and sixpence
• Dedicated to: her grandfather, the late Robert Burnard, "a pioneer of Dartmoor preservation"

The Outline of Dartmoor's Story is a short illustrated history of the moor, written and illustrated by Sylvia Sayer and printed in 1951. The cover carries the fuller title, From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, inside a crowded border of her own line drawings of hunters, miners, farmers, a horseman and a tractor around a map of the moor.

Her foreword says plainly what it is not: not a guide, since William Crossing's guide already tells you what to see and how to find your way, and not a detailed history. It sets out instead to give newcomers, and Dartmoor-dwellers without time to read all the local literature, "a bird's-eye view of the panorama of Dartmoor's wonderful story" (Sylvia Sayer, The Outline of Dartmoor's Story, 1951).

The chapters run in order through The Dartmoor of Earliest Times, Neolithic and Bronze Age Man on Dartmoor, Dartmoor in the Time of the Romans, The Saxon Invasion, Dartmoor under the Normans and Plantagenets, The Dartmoor Tinners, Dartmoor in the Nineteenth Century and Dartmoor Today. The last chapter turns to the twentieth century: War Department artillery ranges, the work of voluntary societies such as the Dartmoor Preservation Association, and an argument that the moor needs the protection of national park status.

A list of Books of Reference closes the booklet. It names Crossing's One Hundred Years on Dartmoor and Guide to Dartmoor, Robert Burnard's Dartmoor Papers and Dartmoor Pictorial Records, the reports of the Dartmoor Exploration Committee, Robert Dymond's Widecombe in the Moor and Baring-Gould's A Book of Dartmoor, among others.

Second-hand
AbeBooks | World of Books | Biblio | eBay

More about Sylvia Sayer