Dartmoor Through Time
Drag the slider to fade the moor back through more than a century of maps, or press Play to watch it change.
Historic mapping reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland, licensed CC BY 4.0. Modern mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors, and Ordnance Survey OpenData.
For more than a century, surveyors walked this moor and wrote down what they found. The slider above lets you walk back through their work, one decade at a time.
The idea
Most historic map sites make you squint at one sheet at a time, or set two maps side by side and leave you to spot the difference. We wanted something simpler. One Dartmoor, one handle, and time on the other end of it. Drag it back and the plantations thin out, the roads soften, the railways return, and the mines reopen.
Fade, not flick
Each era dissolves into the next, so you watch the change happen rather than compare two frozen pictures. The moment a plantation appears is easier to feel than to describe.
One place, many years
The map stays exactly where you put it. Find your farm, your tor, your local, then move only time. Everything else holds still.
Down to the field
The 25-inch surveys are detailed enough to show individual buildings, field boundaries and leats. You can find a single barn and watch it come and go.
Where the maps come from
Every historic layer here comes from the National Library of Scotland, who scanned these sheets, stitched and georeferenced them, and publish them openly under a Creative Commons licence. They kindly gave us permission to show them alongside our listings. It is a genuinely remarkable public resource, and this page simply would not exist without it.
The modern map underneath is either OpenStreetMap or Ordnance Survey OpenData, both open data, both free to use with credit.
The maps in the slider
| Years | Map | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| 1880s | OS 25-inch Devon, 1st edition | The finest detail we have. Buildings, boundaries, leats, named farms. |
| 1892 to 1903 | OS One-inch, Revised New Series | The whole moor at a glance, as the Victorians left it. |
| 1902 to 1905 | OS 25-inch Devon, 2nd edition | The same fine detail, twenty years on. Compare the two. |
| 1905 to 1907 | OS One-inch, 3rd edition (coloured) | Edwardian Dartmoor, and a handsome map in its own right. |
| 1918 to 1926 | OS One-inch, "Popular" edition | The map of the first walkers and motorists to come here for pleasure. |
| 1931 to 1938 | First Land Utilisation Survey | Not features but use. What was arable, grazing, moor and wood. |
| 1940 to 1947 | Bartholomew Revised Half-Inch | The classic layer-coloured walker's map. Contours you can read. |
| 1945 to 1947 | OS One-inch, New Popular Edition | Post-war Dartmoor, mapped in a hurry as the country reopened. |
| Today | OpenStreetMap or OS OpenData | The moor as it is now, for comparison. |
Things worth hunting for
- The tramways and mines. Zoom into the 1880s 25-inch around the mining valleys and you will find tramways, wheel pits and shafts that have since gone back to gorse.
- The Land Utilisation Survey. The odd one out, and the most interesting. It records how land was used in the 1930s rather than what stood on it, which tells you a great deal about how the moor was actually lived on.
- Names that drift. Spellings wander between editions. A tor or a farm can quietly change its name across fifty years, and the surveyors were not always sure either.
- Your own doorstep. Honestly, this is the one. Find your house, then drag back to the 1880s and see whether it was there at all.
Where we hope this leads
This page is the beginning of it rather than the end. The maps are already in place, so most of what follows is a question of time.
Every listing on its own old map
The long-term aim. Open a pub, a farm or a gallery in the directory and see the same spot as the surveyors drew it in the 1880s, without leaving the page.
Heritage sites and tors
Stone circles, hut circles, crosses and tors, shown as the Victorian surveyors recorded them. Some were mapped carefully. Some were guessed at. Both are worth seeing.
The first map of the moor
The Ordnance Survey's Old Series reached Devon around 1809. It exists and it is beautiful, but it is too coarse to zoom, so it belongs in an article like this one rather than in the slider.
Maps nobody has digitised
Estate maps, tithe maps and the paper maps in our own cupboard. The tools exist to georeference these ourselves and add them to the slider. That is where it gets genuinely new.
Know something we don't? If you have old maps of Dartmoor, or you spot something on these sheets worth telling people about, we would like to hear from you. Half the pleasure of a map is the person who knows what it is showing you.
