Your Moor Stories

Tags

Art Maps, bog, Bronze Age, Conan Doyle, Dart, Dartmoor, Dartmoor Archive, Dartmoor National Park, displacement, flint, granite, Legendary Dartmoor, Merrivale, Michael Morpurgo, Moor Memories, photography, Richard Long, Scorehill, Steven Spielberg, Tate, tin mining, to, Virtual Dartmoor

This project aims to collect stories about Dartmoor – its landscapes, weather, dwellings, art and industries, and, above all, its inhabitants, both residents, or former residents, and passers-bye.

Dartmoor is an area of outstanding natural beauty located in Devon, South West UK. The name comes from the principal river that flows through it, the river Dart. Whilst being relatively small in size (Dartmoor is about 368 sq miles), it includes the largest area of granite in Britain, and its rivers have provided a source of power for industries like tin mining and quarrying throughout the centuries.

Most prehistoric remains on the moor date back to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. The moor hosts numerous menhirs, standing stones or longstones, stone circles, cairns and stone rows, such as Scorhill near Chagford (above), a standing stone circle, or Merrivale, between Princetown and Tavistock, an old ceremonial complex dating back from the Bronze Age and consisting of a double stone row, with a leat running in between, a stone circle, a menhir and burial cairns (below).

There are also numerous medieval settlements, some ancient tenements or farms, as well as sites and surviving buildings from the tin mining industry.

Large areas of the moor are covered in peat and contain dangerous bogs. Some are used by the army as a training camp. The moor also hosts a notorious prison, Dartmoor Prison, originally built for prisoners of war during the Napoleonic period.

Known for its tors, hills topped with rounded boulder-like formations (above), Dartmoor is protected by its National Park status. It has been written about on numerous websites, such as Legendary Dartmoor; or the National Park’s own map of Dartmoor legends; Dartmoor.co.uk as well as Virtual Dartmoor; Dartmoor Archive, an online database of images relating to Dartmoor;  and Moor Memories, an oral history project which run between 2001 and 2008 and aimed to collect stories by people who live on the moor, to name but a few.

Dartmoor inspired significant works of literature. For example, Fox Tor Mires was allegedly the inspiration for Great Grimpen Mire in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-2), the story of an attempted murder inspired by the legend of a hound. Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (1982), a story of bravery and friendship set at the outbreak of Word War I, was filmed on the moor, even though the original story took place in the parish of Iddesleigh.

Dartmoor also inspired significant works of art. Among the most recent ones, is Richard Long’s A Hundred Mile Walk 1971-2, documenting a walk on Dartmoor made by the artist in 1971-2, following a circular route (see above). Long in fact did numerous works on Dartmoor, often involving moving rocks from one site to another.

Over time, ‘displacement’ became for me a trope for the project. The objects in the RAMM collection that originate from Dartmoor, primarily flints (that appear on the project map), have been displaced. The objects in the Hems collection (that form our game) were also displaced, by Hems himself. The stones that form one of Long’s most significant works on Dartmoor (and that I have written about in another project, Art Maps, a collaboration with Tate) had been displaced. Most people I have met who come from Dartmoor no longer live on the moor.

Maybe by telling us your story, your Dartmoor story, you can help us to relate objects, peoples and places. Maybe you can help us to imagine what it means to look at these objects on the actual moor. Maybe by doing this you can help us to see Dartmoor not just as a tourist site, but as a place. Maybe knowing what Dartmoor is like as a place will tell us all more about ourselves.

Development

Tags

1010media, Andy Chapman, archive, Art Maps, Bronze Age, Dartmoor, detective, East Dartmoor, Gabriella Giannachi, game, Harry Hems, Helen Burbage, Kate Squires, map, Rick Lawrence, South Dartmoor, Tate, Tom Cadbury, trajectories, Victorian

The core components of our project are an archive, a game and a map. At our first development meeting, we discussed all three components, brainstorming different possibilities of user engagement and planning our work over the next three months. By we, I mean: the developer Andy Chapman from 1010media; RAMM’s curator for antiquities Tom Cadbury; RAMM’s digital media officer Rick Lawrence; the documentation assistant Helen Burbage; our volunteer helper Kate Squires, and myself.

Following on from my research on trajectories through user experiences, I always felt that the three components should remain distinct, although Moor Stories would be constituted by all of them. This is in order to facilitate different types of journeys through RAMM’s collections on Dartmoor (inside the Museum, on Dartmoor, and online).

The archive should act as a digital library. Users could browse it; gain knowledge over the RAMM collection; find parallels between artefacts; and explore the development of art in Dartmoor chronologically by looking at Bronze Age Dartmoor, Victorian Dartmoor, etc. Andy (with Helen and Tom below) pointed out how it was important that free exploration should be facilitated in this context, just like in a real library and that the design of the website should be uncluttered, though perhaps entailing a Victorian theme of some kind.

The game, on the other hand, would be structured around the theme of the church detective. Helen noted that it should be playful and we all feel that it should use the theme of the detective to encourage users to explore churches on Dartmoor and help us to locate the objects that Hems worked on in Dartmoor. From a learning point of view, the game would encourage users to look at churches, find objects, search for parallels between them, and develop knowledge. In fact in a sense, our game users would act as Moor Stories researchers.

Finally, the map, aims to attract the curiosity of the Dartmoor explorer (walkers, tourists, families) prompting them to juxtapose a physical exploration of Dartmoor with the viewing of the artefacts in RAMM’s collection that are connected to specific sites on the Moor. The map may not be the terrain, but in our case the design of the map is rendered more complex by the overlap of a number of factors. Tom noted that most artefacts in the RAMM collection stem from East and Southern Dartmoor, but we don’t always know exactly where they are from. A number of areas in Dartmoor have no connectivity, so we will need to start by looking at overlaps between areas which have connectivity and locations which are related to objects in the RAMM collection. Rick also noted that we can’t go into the areas covered by the military and, to be more inclusive, we shouldn’t adventure too far from car parks, although to attract walkers we may have the odd long trail.

At one level we hope this project will take the Museum out of itself, and another we hope that users who will have experienced objects on Dartmoor may wish to go back to RAMM to look at the physical artefacts themselves. To this extent we are considering a view on demand option in case a certain number of users wish to view a particular object in the museum as a direct consequence of participating in Moor Stories.  This of course would only be possible if the object could be safely displayed (i.e. if there was no risk of deterioration), so we are not sure about the feasibility of this idea. However, as is the case of other digital projects, such as Art Maps at Tate, we feel that it is critical that more relationships are built between the objects in these ‘national’ collections and the people themselves, ‘the nation’ to whom these objects belong.