Journal — Pollen Record of Dartmoor

Rowan berries once reddened in September. In 2026, by mid-July. A record of shifting baselines, and the trees that keep no record of their own.

If you've been to Princetown, you no doubt will have travelled through many habitats to arrive in the village: lowland farms, valley forests, and the bleak high moor. If we were to take a sample from each of these places, they would have slightly different contemporary pollen assemblages. Hold that in mind. Of course, we shouldn't be surprised that there are variations in the pollen record between places; however, ecologists from the 1960s and earlier, would sometimes take a single study and assume that the rest of the surrounding land had the same plants. Sometimes, the scientists would even make...

The pollen record is retrieved from land. Soil is collected from "today" back 10,000 years, just after the glaciers retreated. It isn't worth collecting samples below glacial till because it's likely that soil has been churned, and no longer sits in the correct, reverse chronological, order. The soil can be collected through a number of methods depending on the environment. As there are no naturally occurring (long-running) lakes on Dartmoor, core samples need to be taken from mechanical boring, or from cuts in the land (e.g., from streams, or dug holes). The samples of soil are processed in a lab,...

Compared to cities and countryside hedgerows, it's actually quite difficult to forage for colour on the high moor of Dartmoor. The earliest tree colonisers of Dartmoor after the glaciers were dwarf willow and birch. Dartmoor has seen the comings and goings of trees for thousands of years. Most have disappeared completely from the uplands. Replaced by boggy, acidic soils, and a sea of Molinia grass. Birch Birch was one of the first trees to arrive. Gradually, it was out-competed by hazel and it disappears from the pollen record. The bark from birch trees is known to make a soft pink....