215x140mm, 180 pages, illustrated, The illustrated colour dust jacket would appear to be originally intended to belong to the hardback edition as the folders do not align with the spine. Consequently there is some wear at the top edge where the dust jacket overlaps the edge of the book. Exmoor has a history reaching back, on the evidence of physical remains alone, for over 3000 years. To recount its story the reader has someone who lives on Exmoor, is fascinated by it in all its moods and who knows the people of the moor. The author has lived in the villages and isolated farms across the face of the more from many years and will be remembered for her delightful earlier book "living on Exmoor". In turning to the more disciplined and objective study of her adopted home, the author has lost nothing of the fiery affection that marked her first book. She combines, with an intimate acquaintance of the soil and climate, the plants and wildlife, the method in enquiring persistence of the scholar in piercing together the story of this once Royal Forest, beginning in a world where megalithic circles and Clapper Bridges were new. This is the first comprehensive study of the region since McDermott's which appeared in the 19th century. The beginnings of Exmoor as a "place" are traced to the rise of the Celtic kingdom of Dumnonia, followed by a description of the steady colonisation of the moor by the Saxons until their subjection at the hands of the Normans. The Normans founded that particularly brutal and arrogant institution known as the Royal Forest, which the author shows to have existed as a legal concept down to the Napoleonic wars, but which ceased to be a social reality about the time Exmoor fell to the Commonwealth, along with such crown lands as Charles I had not already pawned away. You then follow the varying fortunes of the landowners, farmers and stag hunters throughout the 18th century, onto the dis-afforestation by the agents of George III and the acquisition of a vast freehold estate by the agricultural improver, John Knight of SimonSBATH. This last resulted in the enclosure Plantation settlement of new farms which have made Exmoor the land of rewarding farming it is today. The final chapter brings events and changes up to the present when Exmoor is scheduled as a National Park. Illustrated with nine line drawings by the author, a brown stain not affecting text affecting intermittently the bottom corner of the pages. An uncorrected proof.
