Dartmoor’s Burnard

His sweet, placable temper, his kindliness and courtesy to all, made everyone who knew him esteem him highly.  So wrote the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould of his good friend Robert Burnard, the centenary of whose death is today. (15 April 1920).

Robert Burnard established the Dartmoor Preservation Association (DPA) in 1883 and was the grandfather of my good friend Sylvia Sayer.  He was the son of Charles Frederick Burnard, a founder of the firm of Burnard, Lack and Alger, manufacturers of chemical and other fertilizers, based originally in Sutton Road and then on Cattedown wharf in Plymouth.

Burnard ancestors
Syl gave a talk to the Kelly College sixth form in May 1973, Burnards and Baring-Goulds on Dartmoor.  She said that the Burnard ancestors were yeomen farmers at Laneast, close to the eastern boundary of Bodmin Moor, and that granite was in their blood.  There are records of a Burnard the Napeless, or Bull-necked Burnard, who held estates in Devon under Baldwin de Redvers in the time of William the Conqueror—a short neck and round face are family characteristics, which have been passed down the generations.

Robert Burnard on the bank of the West Dart at Huccaby

Robert, who was born in Plymouth on 12 July 1848, inherited his love of Dartmoor from his father.  As a child he stayed at Tor Royal and Beardown Farms.  An entry in his father’s diary for 11 May 1864 says: ‘On the Moor; breakfast at 7.30 and then down to Huccaby to fish, fished until 4pm.  I caught 12 fine fish and Robert eight’.  Robert was 16 and remembered that day all his life; they lunched off pasties at the Forest Inn and saw old Cleave, the landlord, plying his other trade as a cobbler there.

View near Beardown Farm. Photo © Peter Harper, Creative Commons Licence

In 1871 Robert married Fanny Louise Pearce and they had four children: Olive (Sylvia’s mother), Lawrence (who married Baring-Gould’s daughter Barbara, thus bringing the two families together), Charles and Dorothy.

Huccaby House
The Reverend Edward Harris built Huccaby House on the bank of the West Dart in 1875.  Such a building would be unlikely to get planning permission today.  As Syl said in her school talk: its lower storey was built of granite, so that was all right, but its top half was hung with scalloped red tiles and it had a red tiled roof, and there was a hint of Balmoral about its turreted south front.  Standing on a little rocky eminence above the West Dart, in its original nakedness and before its screening trees grew up, this Victorian architect’s fantasy must have seemed an outrage, a cruel wart on the fair face of Dartmoor.  Charles Burnard bought the lease from the Duchy of Cornwall in 1883 and Robert lived there from 1904.

Huccaby from near the Forest Inn, Huccaby House in the centre. Photo by Robert Burnard from Dartmoor Pictorial Records vol 1 (1890)

Syl recalled her childhood visits to Huccaby as magic.  She and her sister Phyllis would leave notes on their parents’ pillows: ‘Please, please take us to Huccaby, soon!’  They travelled by train from Plymouth to Princetown where they were met by a pony and trap driven by King the coachman.  ‘Gramps’ raised the union jack on the flagstaff at Huccaby House to herald their arrival.  They would race to the old settle and clamber on to Gramps’s lap for a story.  Together they would walk the moor in pure happiness.

The family photos show him as a kindly person enjoying the company of his family and friends.

The Burnard family on White Ridge, while on holiday at Postbridge, 1893. Their friend George French is standing (Sayer collection)

In 1887 Robert published his first paper on Dartmoor’s antiquities.  He was a very thorough man and, conscious that the existing archaeological knowledge of Dartmoor was somewhat superficial, he decided systematically to excavate the prehistoric hut circles under the aegis of the Devonshire Association’s Dartmoor Exploration Committee.

Baring-Gould
Sabine Baring-Gould from Lew House at Lewtrenchard, was also exploring the moor at that time, and the two met in the 1880s at meetings of archaeological societies to which they both belonged.  As Syl wrote: although the two were physically very unlike—Sabine tall and thin, with that falcon face; my grandfather short and sturdily built, with the round face and short neck of his ancestors—they were astonishingly alike in their interests and outlook, and even in their political opinions.  Robert cared as little for the conventional way of life of the Tory establishment as Sabine did; both were lifelong Liberals.

Robert Burnard near Cherry Brook Bridge, December 1887

Between 1894 and 1906, Robert, Sabine and others were involved in an intensive programme of excavation and restoration, of settlements and ceremonial sites.  Robert contributed many articles to the Transactions of the Devonshire Association, and became one of the association’s honorary general secretaries in 1908-9 and president in 1911.  Robert and Sabine persuaded the Ordnance Survey to record the many prehistoric remains which were unmapped and at risk.  In 1894 they wanted to map the recently-discovered double stone row at Conies Down and set off from Princetown, but the mist came down, they got lost and ended up at Mary Tavy many miles away.

Re-erecting the largest prehistoric standing-stone at Drizzlecombe, Sheepstor, 20 June 1893: Baring-Gould, Burnard and the Rev W A G Gray. Photo R H Worth (from A Dartmoor Century 1883-1983, DPA)

Drizzlecombe standing-stone today

Robert was also an excellent photographer and produced his four volumes of Dartmoor Pictorial Records which provide a visual record of much of Dartmoor’s landscape.  Each was signed by him and the publisher, William Brendon & Son of Plymouth.  He published 150 copies of volume 1 and was surprised by the popularity of the series, which ran to 200 copies for the remaining three volumes.

Inscriptions in Sylvia Sayer’s copy of volume 1 of Dartmoor Pictorial Records

The catalysts for the formation of the DPA in 1883 were the attempts by the Duchy of Cornwall, which owned much of Dartmoor, to make the moor more productive, in conflict with the rights of commoners, and the intensification of use for military training.  Robert produced a map, Plundered Dartmoor, in 1895 in which he showed how the enclosures of the moor had mushroomed between 1820 and 1895.

Grandest park
He wrote in the introduction: The plundering of Dartmoor has been slowly going on for a long period, but within the last century the spoliation has been rapid and that now access from the north quarter to the south is entirely cut off— … the whole of the best part of the Forest land has been enclosed… . He feared the defilement of Dartmoor’s streams to provide water for nearby cities.  He argued that the Forest of Dartmoor should become the property of the people as ‘the grandest park in England’, and the commoners’ rights confirmed there.  Devon County Council should ‘step into the shoes of the Duchy’ and buy Dartmoor for the people’—far sighted indeed.

Plundered Dartmoor, the enclosures are in red: 1820 on the left, 1895 on the right

He wrote in similar vein in the introduction to his second volume of Dartmoor Pictorial Records, published in 1891, deploring the enclosures and ‘the spirit of spoliation’.

He was well travelled.  Not only did he and Sabine explore northern France, Wales and Cornwall to study the antiquities but he also visited the Malay Peninsula and Egypt.

Syl ended her talk: The great-great grandchildren of Robert and Sabine, who are related to each other through the marriage of Lawrence Burnard with Barbara Baring-Gould, quite often meet on Dartmoor today, and I have a photograph of them grouped together with their parents on the top of Hartland Tor, the ages of the children being from 12 down to five.  And there, most unmistakably, are the falcon Baring-Gould faces and the round faces of the descendants of Burnard the Napeless, and I love to think that in a sense Sabine and Robert are still here on their beloved Dartmoor, and that they know it, and are happy.

Robert Burnard, 12 July 1848 – 15 April 1920

Some of Robert Burnard’s descendants at Huccaby chapel on 24 November 2019, to dedicate a plaque to Guy and Sylvia Sayer