In its reading of N. T. Carrington’s Dartmoor; a descriptive poem (1826), this blog takes its cue from this year’s Heritage Open Days theme of ‘Routes – Networks – Connections’. Carrington’s verses celebrate the beauties of his native county, “Lovely Devonia! land of flowers and songs!”, and particularly the primeval solitudes of the moor. Unusually, they were published with an extensive preface and notes by another writer: one William Burt, Esq. Together, poem and annotations encouraged nineteenth-century readers to connect with Dartmoor’s unique landscape, and to invest in its future.

Noel Thomas (sometimes Nicholas Toms) Carrington was born in Plymouth in 1777 and lived there most of his life. He was a teacher, and ran his own school for more than two decades – though sadly, in his later years, competition from new subscription schools left him in straitened circumstances. In his biography of his father, H. E. Carrington describes his “heavy and unceasing toil” (11): how, after working a twelve-hour day, he would spend his few leisure hours writing or walking about the countryside. His “love of nature was intense – it formed the never-failing under-current of all his thoughts and musings”. In “The Poet”, one of his later compositions, Carrington himself describes seeing God in the beautiful world around him. Across his three collections, Dartmoor (1826), The banks of Tamar (1828), and My native village (1830), local attachment and the sublime beauty of nature remain constant themes. Carrington’s poems inspired his readers to form their own connection with the Devon landscape, and a guide to his favourite walks was even published to “lead … kindred spirits to meditate where he has so frequently mused”.

Now largely forgotten, Carrington’s Dartmoor was widely admired in its day.  One enthusiastic reviewer declared “[t]his poem … is one of the most beautiful specimens of descriptive verse we ever remember to have met with” (Manchester Courier, 22 April 1826), and Carrington’s son later recalled how George IV “ordered his opinion of the poem to be transmitted to the Author in the shape of Fifty Guineas” – roughly equivalent to £3,000 today. The poem contains much to charm even a modern reader – especially one who, like Carrington (and myself), grew up with Dartmoor on the horizon.

“Dartmoor! Thou wert to me, in childhood’s hour,
A wild and wond’rous region. Day by day,
Arose upon my youthful eye thy belt
Of hills mysterious, shadowy, clasping all
The green and cheerful landscape sweetly spread
Around my home, and with a stern delight
I gazed on thee”

Dartmoor was written in 1824, in response to a competition advertised by the Royal Literary Society. But it was informed by Carrington’s longstanding relationship with the moor; by the detailed knowledge of its localities, history, stories, and people, which he had gathered during his extensive walks.  In the end, Carrington missed the competition deadline and set aside his manuscript until William Burt urged him to publish it, accompanied by his own lengthy preface and notes. Burt was a solicitor and Secretary of the Plymouth Chamber of Commerce, whose previous publications had been concerned primarily with politics and economics. What, we might wonder, drew him to Carrington’s poem?

                                 “— through the rock
Of ages, hills abrupt, and caverns deep,
The Railway leads its mazy track. The will
Of Science guides its vast meanders on,
From Plym’s broad union with the ocean wave
To Dartmoor’s silent desert; and the depths
Of solitudes primeval now resound
With the glad voice of man. The dauntless grasp
Of Industry assails yon mighty Tors”

There is an odd opposition at the heart of Dartmoor. While Carrington revels in the “deep tranquillity” of the moor, he is also enthusiastic about contemporary plans to enclose and colonise it. He pictures the wilderness transformed into cultivated fields, and imagines – quite cheerfully – how the venerable tors will be blasted to pieces, slid down the “iron-way” to Plymouth, and shipped on to London to “form the proudest domes” of the metropolis. This would have pleased Burt, who was himself deeply interested in improving Devon’s economic prospects. In his preface to the poem, Burt laments that Dartmoor, which “for its natural grandeur … demands admiration, and, for its susceptibility to improvement, invites culture”, should have been “consigned to a sterility perfectly hopeless”.  That is, he adds, until a “few spirited persons undertook the task of partially reclaiming it, and the Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway Company was established”.

After publishing his Review of the Port of Plymouth (1816), in which he sought to promote the prosperity of the city, Burt had become involved with the Plymouth and Dartmoor Railway Company. This was the brainchild of that fervent champion of the moor, Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt of Tor Royal, who, having founded Princetown (and built Dartmoor Prison), now wished to increase its prosperity. Through the railway, writes historian H. G. Kendall, “the barren slopes of Dartmoor were to be reclaimed, to which end lime and sea-sand were to be imported as manures. Pauperism was to be decreased, and a flourishing colony of agriculturalists was to be planted”.  It was generally agreed that the “projected colonisation” was also “pregnant with advantages to Plymouth” (Commercial Chronicle, 5th February 1820).  In Kendall’s words, the port would “acquire a valuable hinterland which would materially increase its prosperity”. The railway finally reached Princetown in December 1826, the same year that Dartmoor was published, and seemed to herald a new era for the region. Carrington’s verses proclaim that “The future beams / with hope’s inspiring ray”, and Burt’s notes are equally confident in predicting that the barren moor will soon “wear the verdure of woods, and corn, and grass”.

Ultimately, Tyrwhitt’s plans did not come to fruition. The railway struggled to recoup its costs, and never brought great prosperity. Attempts to reclaim the moor for agricultural purposes were rarely successful, but they did continue. In 1895 Robert Burnard published a map of Plundered Dartmoor, which strikingly illustrates the land lost to enclosures over the course of the nineteenth century – ‘improvements’ which took common pasture away from poor, local people, and placed it into the hands of a wealthy few. Carrington’s verses give a valuable insight into the lofty ideals which drove these developments: local attachment, and the ardent belief in human progress and the power of industry and science. Burt’s notes, on the other hand, reveal some economic imperatives: the need for expanding cities like Plymouth to acquire rural ‘hinterlands’ to support their continued growth, and the capitalist fantasy of transforming wild natures into profit.

The historical changes reflected in Carrington’s Dartmoor were only the local expression of a wider expansionist project, which would reshape landscapes across the globe. While Devon’s leading men were considering how best to make the “desert” of Dartmoor profitable, others were looking further afield: to America, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. The DEI holds several examples of the ‘booster literature’ which encouraged people to invest energy, time and money into claiming foreign ‘wildernesses’ and making them work for Britain: Peter Miller Cunningham’s Two years in New South Wales (1827), Thomas Potter Macqueen’s Australia as she is and as she may be (1840), and the New Zealand Association’s outline of The British Colonization of New Zealand (1837), to name but a few. As historian James Belich has shown, new transport networks, settler migration, and intensive agropastoral industry would transform these far-flung regions into Britain’s “virtual hinterlands” by the end of the nineteenth century.

Fiona Schroeder, Library Assistant

 

The following books are available to view in the Devon and Exeter Institution library:

Robert Burnard, Plundered Dartmoor. A Map of the Enclosures of Dartmoor about the year 1820; A Map of the Enclosures of Dartmoor, 1895 (1895). Shelved in Map Drawer 4.

William Burt, Review of the mercantile, trading, and manufacturing state, interests, and capabilities of the Port of Plymouth (1816). Classmark S.W. Heritage 1816 BUR.

N. T. Carrington and William Burt, Dartmoor: a descriptive poem (1826). Classmark S.W. Cupboard 1826 CAR.

N. T. Carrington and Henry E. Carrington, The collected poems of the late N.T. Carrington (1834). Classmark S.W. Cupboard 1834 CAR.

The topograph; or, Pedestrian’s companion to the principal bye-ways within nine miles of Devonport and Plymouth, and most of the favourite walks of the late N.T. Carrington (1838). Classmark S.W. Heritage 1838 TOP.

H. G. Kendall, The Plymouth & Dartmoor Railway and its fore-runners (1968). Classmark AD 385 KEN.