Editor's Blog
Summer issue to print!
After two long days at the computer(s) in my barn outside Moretonhampstead, Emily and I are pleased to say that the summer issue is (almost) ready to go to print! It’s a time-consuming process: correcting text glitches, moving around photos and captions, checking photo acknowledgements, finalising ads and cover lines and so on. Over the weekend Emily will go through every page again before I have a final look and then it will be uploaded to the printers’ portal. Subscribers’ copies will be sent out around 26 May, and the bulk delivery will reach us that week for delivery to our 60 or so sales outlets around the moor.
In this issue we’ve got a broad range of articles, as usual: I’ve been out to Shilstone Rocks Stud near Widecombe to learn all about the registered Dartmoor Pony; Richard Horsham examines Dartmoor’s blanket bog in enormous detail; we have walks along the Two Moors Way, to Cranmere Pool (and with llamas!); Tavistock Golf Club celebrates its 125th birthday; Tim Jenkinson takes an in-depth look at the rocks of Hound Tor Coombe; and much, much more. There are interviews with ‘Tich’ Scott and Bill Murray, and with sculptor Peter Randall-Page from Drewsteignton, and Nick Baker looks at the underwater life of a Dartmoor stream. This issue’s beautiful cover and Contents page photos (see Contents spread below) have been supplied by Richard Fox of Bovey Tracey. And in this issue we have an amazing eight pages of News, including the story of the new part-time Post Office that has taken up residence in Throwleigh parish church.
Tomorrow I’m off to Princetown for the Dartmoor Local History Day: an annual gathering of representatives from local history groups, with talks from an excellent range of speakers. After that it’s down to Parke for the Dartmoor Pony Heritage Trust’s 10th birthday party… and then next week I shall be commissioning articles and planning the autumn issue!
Welcome to the new website!
After many months of hard work we are delighted to launch the new Dartmoor Magazine website. One of the new features will be the Editor’s blog, through which I plan to keep interested parties up to speed with what’s been happening on Dartmoor and with the magazine. We would be very interested to hear what you think of the website: if you have any constructive comments please send them to enquiries@dartmoormagazine.co.uk.
My first ‘proper’ blog post will follow soon!
Spring cleaning
One thing that happens to my year as a result of editing a quarterly magazine is that time appears to speed up! Yesterday I went to Home Farm Café at Parke for a lunchtime meeting with Catherine Parsons, Visitor Services and Enterprise Manager for the National Trust on Dartmoor. We looked through Catherine’s suggestions for subjects for the NT pages in each issue and before long we were deciding what should go into the next winter issue… another year gone, just like that! While I was at Parke I also met the NT’s Lead Ranger AJ (Bellamy) properly at last, and caught up with the National Park’s Visitor Services Manager Richard Drysdale too.
There’s a lot of that every January for me: meetings, making plans, looking ahead to issues later in the year (as well as thinking up ideas for series to run through 2016, which need to be decided a year in advance so that the photographs can be taken in the right season). Today I’ve had my Mac chap here sorting out a few problems with my 7500 iPhoto images (hence ‘spring cleaning’), and tomorrow I’ll be getting on with editing some of the spring issue features that are starting to trickle in.
It’s all a bit of a juggling act… but never boring!
