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About this Website

The hope is that this site will provide a clear and informative way to inspire people to enjoy Dartmoor by providing self-guided walking information and suggested routes.

Background

Many of the photographs, routes and research for this site were originally taken by Keith Ryan for his DartmoorCam website. Sadly, Keith became unable to continue maintaining DartmoorCam and passed it to Simon Avery to preserve it. As well as preserving the original DartmoorCam, Simon has shared Keith’s work here and added his own experience and knowledge of Dartmoor to create an entirely new and more accessible website.

People

Keith Ryan

Creator of Dartmoorcam

Keith was born in Cornwall and spent his working life as a Marine Biologist based at Plymouth Hoe. He loved Dartmoor and started walking it in 1969, starting his website in 2004 to document the walks with photos and informed narrative. Keith led many group walks over the moor - notably with the Dartmoor Trust, meticulously researching both geographical and human history along the way. He recorded well over 600 walks on Dartmoorcam, all with many photographs, footnotes and information. As well as his website of Dartmoor walks, Keith has also written several other sites which have been preserved. Please see the links section.

Keith passed away at St Luke’s Hospice in May, 2023.

Simon Avery

Creator and maintainer of this website and co-author or author of the walks therein

Simon lives on Dartmoor and has worked on and with many people associated with it since the 1980s. As countless others do, he loves Dartmoor, its nature and rich history. Simon worked for two years in the late 1980s as part of Dartmoor National Park Authority’s Works Department out of Station Yard, Bovey Tracey. In 2018, he also served on the Community Stakeholder’s group for the Moor than Meets the Eye project, using National Lottery money to improve Dartmoor. Additionally, he spent over twenty years working for the Mare & Foal Sanctuary, working with Dartmoor Hill Ponies, Habitats, Organisations and Owners.

Website Roadmap

DartmoorCam is a wonderful website with a huge wealth of data and Keith was rightly proud of it. Unfortunately, that size has made it somewhat difficult to navigate and use and feedback suggests it can be overwhelming. The site consists of over 6,000 html files and more than 50,000 image files, and with some parts of the code dating back to 2002, it has also proved difficult to manage.

The hope with this site was to make some of that information more accessible and appealing to more people. It is not intended to replace DartmoorCam, only to share the information more widely.

It is hoped that in time, this site may grow to include other people’s favourite walks too.

More walks from DartmoorCam are gradually being added to this site, and where possible, extended from personal and researched knowledge.

It is hoped that Keith would have approved.

Legacy

People give a huge amount of their time and knowledge to create websites for the benefit of other people. As custodian of Keith’s websites as well as others, I would like to make not just these websites free use, but also provide the source code to them in somewhere permanent and known so that if I am no longer able to maintain and pay for them, they will continue to exist in some form. So many useful websites have already been lost in the short time the internet has been in use, that permanent archiving is very much something I would like to provide. This is a key reason that the code for this website is published on Github and should remain available forever.

Before his death, Keith transferred all Copyrights and ownership to text and images used on these Websites to Simon Avery. It is on that assertion that this website has been created from Keith’s original content.

Any enquiries, or requests to re-use words or images used on this or the following sites should be made to Simon Avery

  • Ordnance Survey Maps are Crown Copyright Ordnance Survey, reproduced under Licence number 100047373
  • OpenStreetMap and Leaflet Copyrights

Software used in this site

This site is made entirely from FOSS Software

  • Hugo for static site generation
  • Stack for the Hugo theme used, heavily modified
  • Linux (Specifically Debian) for development
  • VSCode for page editing
  • Utterances to allow commenting
  • OpenStreetMap and Leaflet for the Map of Walks, together with custom Perl to generate the Popups at build time

And also

The Source code to this Website is mirrored to Github

  • This website does not track your online activity or use cookies for advertising or commercial purposes.
  • We do not sell, trade or pass your information to others in any way.

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How we use cookies

We use cookies to:

  • Provide feedback via Utterances which, if you choose to log into Github to comment on this site, remembers who you are. Github have their own privacy policy.
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No Dartmoor Walking cookies require opt-in to satisfy GDPR so a user prompt is not required.

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