The landscape of Britain (and much of the rest of the world) is now known to be related to a large number of human influences, which have been the subject of extensive archaeological research.

The aim of this project is to foster student’s appreciation of the extent to which landscape has been changed by human activity, and the, perhaps surprising, conclusion that some of the areas which we value most today for their natural beauty are only that way not due to human influence, and, indeed, may in the past have been very different.

Dartmoor possesses three features which make it nearly unique for this exercise, which could be based almost anywhere within the park boundary, but is certainly convenient in the Haytor-Hound Tor area:

• The moor has one of the most complete and intact Bronze Age landscapes in western Europe, with literally thousands of stone circles being the remains of huts, as well as very complex system of land division in the form of the reaves, and “sacred” sites which include barrows and stone rows and circles. The Haytor area is not the best endowed on the Moor for these antiquities, but all do exist.
• Agriculturally the Moor was only used extensively other than during the Bronze Age during the Medieval period. At Hound Tor is one well preserved and excavated Medieval farmstead.
• Tin and other rare industrial minerals have been found on the Moor and from the Elizabethan period and before the Moor has been the subject of extensive tin mining involving
• streaming (extraction from alluvial deposits),
• veining (where miners dug back into viens which they found from the concentrations of included tin in the alluvium),
• shaftmining (where miners dug deep underground following the rich viens).
• Evidence of mining is many and varied and even rabbit warrens can be found in the area of the Moor. Again the remains in the Haytor area are not classic, but they do all exist.
• Finally, on Haytor is the evidence for the extraction of granite. During the 19th century the Haytor area provided granite to many of the great Victorian building projects in London and other British cities. The evidence of this quarrying is outstanding with the granite tramway one almost unique feature.

• To appreciate the human influences of a small area of Dartmoor
• To establish whether that area is representative of the wider Dartmoor
• To promote identication of human remains in the landscape
• To foster a critical understanding of how landscape features may have been influenced by people

• Base mapping of the Haytor-Hound Tor area. This may include
• Raster scanned 1:10,000 to 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey maps and/or
• Detailed digital aerial photography
• Depending on the VFC component to be used a Digital Elevation Model may be desirable, from either the 10m Profile or the 50m Panorama products from the Ordnance Survey.
• A rich multimedia dataset of images, panoramas, video, etc., all with supporting text, should be available.

As outlined, this project would take half a day, including time to explore the database and prepare the journal file.

Many extensions might be envisaged, however, including getting different groups of students to prepare their own multimedia database and guided tour of other parts of the Moor. This would take much longer, but could be the basis of a good 1-2 days fieldwork following use of the current exercise as priming.

Students should be asked to explore the multimedia database and to develop a chronological journey through the area of interest. This journey should be submitted as a VFC journal file, and evaluated on how representative are the sites visited (of those available).

Students may be asked to present a commentary on the journal file as fresh HTML text embedded in the journal.

In follow-up fieldwork students may be asked to visit other areas on the Moor and to produce a similar multimedia database for that area, and to submit a journal file and HTML text.