Myth, reality and romantic revelations: tracing a biography of heritage on Dartmoor (1638-2020)

Several people died as they sheltered in the Church and accounts of the event soon started to circulate. The paper examines the nexus between accounts that emerged over the following months and years of ‘ball lightning’ and associated revelations both of God’s vengeance and the Devil’s trickery. The paper will also consider how situated heritage narratives of the event acted as a lesson for personal religious conduct, heralded a hesitant early scientific investigation, acted as a marque of elite taste, and eventually became infused with romantic yearning to explain an unusual archaeological feature in the landscape. In so doing, folkloric storytelling in the 20th century acted to conceal a hidden heritage of everyday hardship. Tracing a biographical life history of how the storm of 1638 was narrated and memorialised, therefore, the paper charts how a heritage of landscape and place can unfold over several centuries.

David C Harvey is an associate professor in critical heritage studies at Aarhus University, Denmark, and an honorary professor of historical and cultural geography at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom). His work has focussed on the geographies of heritage, and he has contributed to some key heritage debates, including processual understandings of heritage, extending the temporal depth of heritage, the outlining of heritage-landscape and heritage-climate change relations and the opening up of hidden memories through oral history. His recent works include The Real Agricultural Revolution: The Transformation of English Farming 1939-1985 (with Paul Brassley et al., 2021), which won the Joan Thirsk Prize (2022), Creating Heritage: Unrecognised Pasts and Rejected Futures (edited with Tom Carter et al., 2020), Commemorative Spaces of the First World War: Historical Geography at the Centenary (edited with James Wallis, 2018), and The Future of Heritage as Climates Change: Loss, Adaptation and Creativity (edited with Jim Perry, 2015). He is on the Editorial Board of The International Journal of Heritage Studies, and co-edits a Berghahn Book Series Exploration in Heritage Studies. In his spare time, David cycles a lot, plays a bit of football and struggles to learn Danish. 

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