Place:Dartington, Devon, England

redirected from Place:Dartington, Devon
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NameDartington
Alt namesDertrintonasource: Domesday Book (1985) p 80
Dertrintonesource: Domesday Book (1985) p 80
TypeAncient parish, Civil parish
Coordinates50.45°N 3.683°W
Located inDevon, England
See alsoStanborough Hundred, Devon, Englandhundred of which the parish was a part
Totnes Rural, Devon, Englandrural district 1894-1974
South Hams District, Devon, Englanddistrict municipality in which it has been located since 1974
the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Dartington (#5 on map) is a civil parish and a village of the same name in the southern part of Devon, England. The electoral ward of Dartington includes the surrounding area and had a population of 1,753 at the 2011 UK census. It is located west of the River Dart, south of Dartington Hall and about two miles (3 km) northwest of Totnes.

Dartington Hall is a country estate that is the headquarters of the Dartington Hall Trust, a charity whose mission is to be a creative catalyst for more just and sustainable ways of living, as a centre for learning in ecology, the arts and social justice. The hall itself is a Grade I listed building and dates from medieval times.

The estate covers 1,200 acres (4.9 km2). It was held by the Martin family between the early 12th and mid 14th centuries but on the death of William Martin in 1326, the feudal barony of Dartington escheated to the crown and in 1384 was granted by King Richard II to his half brother John Holland, 1st Duke of Exeter (c.1352-1400), who was created Earl of Huntingdon in 1388 and Duke of Exeter in 1397.

The 1st Duke was beheaded by King Henry IV who had deposed Richard II, however Dartington continued as the seat of his son John Holland, 2nd Duke of Exeter (1395-1447) and grandson Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter (1430-1475) successively. On the death of the 3rd Duke in 1475 without issue (supposedly drowned at sea on the orders of King Edward IV) Dartington again escheated to the crown. In 1559 it was acquired by Sir Arthur Champernowne, Vice-Admiral of the West under Elizabeth I, whose descendants in a direct male line lived in the Hall for 366 years until 1925.

Image:Totnes RD small.png

The hall was mostly derelict by the time it was bought in 1925 by the British-American millionaire couple Leonard Elmhirst (orig. from Yorkshire) and his wife Dorothy (née Whitney) from New York. They commissioned architect William Weir to renovate the buildings and restored the Great Hall's hammerbeam roof. They sought to improve a depressed agricultural economy by introducing progressive education and rural reconstruction.

The estate developed various schools, colleges and charitable and commercial organisations, including Schumacher College, the Arts at Dartington, the Dartington International Summer School of music, Research in Practice, and the Dartington School for Social Entrepreneurs. In North Devon, the Beaford Centre, set up as an arts centre by the Trust in Great Torrington in the 1960s to bring employment and culture to a rurally depressed area, continues to thrive, although one of its outstanding introductions, Dartington Crystal, has gone through a number of buyouts in its 50 years of existence.

Research Tips

(revised Jul 2021)

  • Ordnance Survey Map of Devonshire North and Devonshire South are large-scale maps covering the whole of Devon between them. They show the parish boundaries when Rural Districts were still in existence and before the mergers of parishes that took place in 1935 and 1974. When expanded the maps can show many of the small villages and hamlets inside the parishes. These maps are now downloadable for personal use but they can take up a lot of computer memory.
  • GENUKI has a selection of maps showing the boundaries of parishes in the 19th century. The contribution from "Know Your Place" on Devon is a huge website yet to be discovered in detail by this contributor.
  • Devon has three repositories for hands-on investigation of county records. Each has a website which holds their catalog of registers and other documents.
  • There is, however, a proviso regarding early records for Devon. Exeter was badly hit in a "blitz" during World War II and the City Library, which then held the county archives, was burnt out. About a million books and historic documents went up in smoke. While equivalent records--particularly wills--are quite easy to come by for other English counties, some records for Devon and surrounding counties do not exist.
  • Devon Family History Society Mailing address: PO Box 9, Exeter, EX2 6YP, United Kingdom. The society has branches in various parts of the county. It is the largest Family History Society in the United Kingdom. The website has a handy guide to each of the parishes in the county and publishes the registers for each of the Devon dioceses on CDs.
  • This is the home page to the GENUKI Devon website. It has been updated since 2015 and includes a lot of useful information on each parish.
  • Devon has a Online Parish Clerk (OPC) Project which can be reached through GENUKI. Only about half of the parishes have a volunteer contributing local data. For more information, consult the website, especially the list at the bottom of the homepage.
  • Magna Britannia, Volume 6 by Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. A general and parochial history of the county. Originally published by T Cadell and W Davies, London, 1822, and placed online by British History Online. This is a volume of more than 500 pages of the history of Devon, parish by parish. It is 100 years older than the Victoria County Histories available for some other counties, but equally thorough in its coverage. Contains information that may have been swept under the carpet in more modern works.
  • There is a cornucopia of county resources at Devon Heritage. Topics are: Architecture, Census, Devon County, the Devonshire Regiment, Directory Listings, Education, Genealogy, History, Industry, Parish Records, People, Places, Transportation, War Memorials. There are fascinating resources you would never guess that existed from those topic titles. (NOTE: There may be problems reaching this site. One popular browser provider has put a block on it. This may be temporary, or it may be its similarity in name to the Devon Heritage Centre at Exeter.)
  • South Hams, Devon, A Genealogical Information Resource A collection of transcriptions of church registers and the 1841 census, plus a free lookup service in registers and other materials that have not been transcribed, for the South Hams District of Devon, England. The website states that its latest transcription was added 10 Nov 2018.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Dartington. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.