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Dartmoor Property Index

by

Mike Brown, Dartmoor Press (Archived Copy)

 

Property Index Sections

The Property Index provides a full A Z Listing of all names of properties plots of land, commons etc. as recorded in the Tithe Apportionments (T/As) Surveys of the late 1830s/early 1840s, toqether with their Parishes, and it should be appreciated that the Index is intended as a Guide only, to the Parishes where these places were located. And in this respect a few words should also be said about the format in which the Index has been presented.

Prefixes such as Higher, lower, Upper, Middle, Great, Little etc, and North, South, East, West, have not been entered, so that only the Main property names are recorded. This should suffice for the purposes of the Index, although I did in fact ponder about whether or not this was in fact the most appropriate method to use for recording the names. But in the end I decided to stick with my original ideas on this, for I wanted the Booklet to also hopefully be of service to users beyond being a simple T/As Index which latter is, of course, its primary purpose. However, as presented, the listings should also serve as an Index to the locations of property names over a much wider period, when prefixes to the main tenements at the farms might have been different, or the Main names might have been spelt slightly differently, helping researchers to locate placenames with which they are not familiar. This purpose would not have been so well served if the T/As entries had been split between Higher, lower, East, West etc, thereby divorcing them from their Principal names.

To illustrate the reasoning behind this, the Pudsham farms in Buckland may be cited. These are presently Higher & Lower Pudsham, and were Higher & Lower Putsham in the T/A. Had these names been placed under 'H' & 'L' in the Index, anyone unfamiliar with the district would not be able to identify a suggested location for Meads Putsham, a name formerly given to one of the Higher Putsham tenements. Neither would they be able to discover the possible whereabouts of North Putsham, a variant sometimes applied to the Lower farm. The property name recorded here is Putsham, which obviously assists in both cases.

Neither would the retention of these prefixes have so readily highlighted the frequent reoccurrence of the most common property names over a wide area, names such Bowden, Lake, Stone, Yeo, and so forth, which I also wanted to demonstrate.

Plots of land are the obvious exceptions to the above edict (for, of course, to enter a parcel of open common called, for example, Little Hill, just under the name Hill would be silly). There will also be a few other exceptions.

Properties which were prefixed by personal names etc are of course entered, in order that these names might be recorded and preserved. In the majority of cases the Main property name will also be listed.

Properties which were sub-divided in the T/As, either by the use of prefixes, or into sub-tenements bearing the same name(s), are denoted with an asterisk (*) after their entry, in order to indicate which properties were entered more than once under different owners and/or occupiers in the T/As.

Properties which were combined in single entries in the T/As have been split for the purposes of the Index, and alternatives and aliases are also recorded under both names. Such methods will again mean that the Booklet should have a wider application, rather than being confined to just being a T/As Index.

Note that in some instances it was not clear from the T/As (coupled with an unfamiliarity with the particular area on my part) whether terms such as "Newtake", "Woodland" etc, when entered on their own, were being used as proper nouns or descriptive terms. Questionable sites such as these are listed.

The following abbreviations have been used: Est = Estate, Hse = House, Ct Cottage, Tnt = Tenement, Fm = Farm.

Property Index Sections

Brian Randell, 16 Jul 2010