William Crossing

William Crossing (1847-1928) was born in Plymouth and settled in South Brent in 1872, going on to live at Brentor and then Mary Tavy, always close to the moor he spent his life documenting. He walked Dartmoor for decades, often covering 28 to 35 miles in a day in heavy leather boots, sometimes leaving before dawn and not returning until after midnight, navigating fog-bound nights by feel of the ground alone. He learned shorthand in 1878 to speed his field notes, and was a founding participant in the Dartmoor Preservation Association.

His books range from guidebooks to folklore to the ancient stone crosses that mark the moor's old ways, culminating in his masterwork Guide to Dartmoor (1909), still regarded as the standard topographical account of the moor over a century later. In 1924, a cleaning woman mistakenly discarded his lifetime collection of field notes as mouse-damaged rubbish - a loss from which, by most accounts, he never fully recovered. He died in Plymouth on 3 September 1928.

Sources: Wikipedia · Legendary Dartmoor. Portrait: a sketch of Crossing published in the Western Morning News in 1904, reproduced via Devon Perspectives.

Books on this site

• Guide to Dartmoor (1909)
• The Ancient Stone Crosses of Dartmoor and its Borderland (1902)
• A Hundred Years on Dartmoor (1901)
• Amid Devonia's Alps (1888)
• The Land of Stream and Tor (1891)
• Gems in a Granite Setting (1905)
• Folk Rhymes of Devon (1911)
• Tales of the Dartmoor Pixies (1890)
• The Western Gate of Dartmoor (1903)