Last year, 2023, the Friends were pleased to support research undertaken jointly by the Universities of Plymouth and Exeter which sought to reassess how the ‘reclamation’ of Exmoor under the Knights should be considered. This research, led by Leonard Baker, used information from two disciplines – archival material and paleoecological data. Material held in the Friend’s archive, particularly the digitised and transcribed sheep diaries of Scottish Head Shepherd, Robert Tait Little, fed into this research project. You can find out more about Robert on this link Robert Tait Little – hoaroak (hoaroakcottage.org)
The researchers from Exeter and Plymouth felt that their findings enabled them to “position ‘reclamation’ within a sequence of long-term management practices that shaped these complex ecosystems” rather than reclamation being a one-off event of improvement during Knight’s heyday. They say that “Revaluating the ‘reclamation’ of Exmoor using archival and palaeoecological data reveals critical differences between what historical actors wanted to happen, what they believed was happening and what was actually happening to local ecosystems.” They explain that “Our work reveals that many of the schemes and projects that historians focus upon during assessments of upland ‘improvement’ were far less ecologically significant than previously assumed.” And that unfortunately, “this was not the exciting story of technological ‘progress’ and ‘conquest’ that the Knights, their agents, or subsequent commentators, wished for.”
No doubt many – perhaps most? – of us have ‘bigged up’ what we or ancestors did and would like to be remembered by history in a positive light. But this new research suggests the need to sometimes reassess what the historical record tells us. The research team published in 2023 and their paper can be accessed on this link through Open Access Revolution and continuity? Reassessing nineteenth-century moorland reclamation through palaeoecological and archival research (tandfonline.com). * It is a fascinating read and the same team are currently working on a book revisiting the reclamation of Exmoor story – due for publication in 2024. For The Friends, it is a delight to be able to bring the record left behind by ordinary people, including Robert Tait Little, into this wider academic community. His descendants are thrilled that his diaries have, all these years later, been dug into to help tell the ongoing history of Exmoor.
Photo permission:
Roger Burton, The Heritage of Exmoor, pg 173
*Distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
