This page and the linked guide maps are very much in a development stage and in a state of flux. The first early version was created in 2023 but not made public as the author considered them to be too much in need of refinement. This is now being made public as a work in progress. The aim is to make the full listings more accessible to researchers and in so doing make it easier to identify omissions and duplicates both in these listings and on the official HER listings. A data tidy including tweaks to rationalise naming is being done in the process of creating these lists. The Shortnames for GPS listings have been overhauled and rationalised. The SiteID for each record will always remain constant and are reecommended for use to refer to entries.
This is a table of 62 guide maps, Dartmoor divided into rectangular blocks. The guides use one page of code using two database tables - the Sites table and a Guide table. The GuideID links the two to generate automated content. The eastern and western, and northern and southern limits (8-digit OS) are included in the table (bottom left corner and upper right corner). A free text field in the Guide table will eventually allow a customised introduction to be added to each Guide. MapZoom is the Zoom level passed to the map.
Each entry in a Guide Map is given a GuideOrder number which purely serves the purpose of bunching together records in the table of that guide into a logical and easy to read fashion. These maybe subject to change as records come and go - please do not quote the GuideOrder number to reference sites on this website. The SiteID of site records will never change and should be used to reference any entry in this database. These guide tables currently include all records except round houses and duplicate records are intentionally included. These may get separated out at some point as often they suggest a data tidy is required on the HER. The occasional duplicate record is desirable such as master records for cairn cemeteries where each individual cairn has it's own record and the master record, marked as a duplicate, acts like an index to those records but does not represent an individual cairn.
The listings in the guides have been separated into a Table of Ritual and Burial Monuments excluding round houses but including everything else. The reason for this is that round houses can swamp listings as they form a big majority of the entries in the Sites Table. They have been retained on the maps.
The Guide Maps pages will include:
The author aims to use these Guide Maps to check listings over time in a focussed way.
There are over 2000 ritual and burial monuments included in these guide maps. The bulk of the database listings were compiled in 2017 and involved the merger of cairn records from Grinsell, Butler, Turner, Prehistoric Monuments of Dartmoor (Radcliffe)and then NMR and HER records. The cairns listed by Butler in his 5 Volume Atlas of Dartmoor Antiquities predated records becoming electronic so many were missing from the HER when these listings were compiled. The HER have been doing a fantastic job in addressing these omissions and during 2024 most of these missing Butler records were added. The task of identifying and matching these new HER Butler records (estimate of 100-120 records) to our records started in December 2024.
The data on the website has been refined over the years by fieldwork and research. Photos have been added and grid references updated with accurate Garmin data. Round house data (4800 records) was supplied by Sandy Gerrard and is in the database but not currently in the tables for these guides although they do appear on the guide maps. A number of records identified in 2017 as HER duplicates have since been deleted from the HER and a major tidy of these was done in 2023. As the underlying site records are updated that will automatically feed into these guide map listings and as such this interface should largely maintain itself.
The reader may notice that what is being talked about here is records and not archaeological sites. Ideally, there should be a one-to-one match but it is very easy for duplication to take place in official records. As a desktop exercise a lot of potential duplicates were identified back in 2017 and many have now gone from the HER. Does this mean all the remaining duplicates identified in these listings are really duplicates? With this quantity of data, no author can claim to have not made mistakes and it maybe that field work is needed to clarify the matter for each case and some records have been restored as unique records. For the purpose of completion of significant listings it is desirable to retain some records marked as duplicates but if they are unnessary clutter they will be removed.
The HER do a fantastic job maintaining the official records and it has been frustrating not to be more pro-active in helping to tidy the HER records beyond publishing this data. It is very time consuming to do this and the author has no funding and not enough time. However, making these Guide Maps public will hopefully help contribute towards this.
Each site record now includes a link to the relevant Guide Map it belongs to. Currently that appears as the GuideID number with a link.
Introduction written 01/01/2025
The author can be emailed via:
Contact email: info@dartmoorwalks.org.uk
Page last updated 12/12/24