The Dartmoor Management Plan is the single most important document for the National Park, guiding decisions affecting Dartmoor’s future over the next 20 years. It sets the vision and objectives and indicates how the Park’s purposes and associated duties will be delivered as well as building a framework for all policy and activity pursued by the National Park Authority and partners.
Dartmoor is a very special place in people’s appreciation of Devon and the wider south west region of England. It is a cultural landscape created through the interaction of distinctive land management practices with the physical environment. This is a place set apart, one made up of many distinct localities but possessed of a clear and cohesive identity rooted throughout recorded history, with its name well established by the 10th century.
The Dartmoor Management Plan reflects these sentiments and takes forward national and regional policies where relevant to the National Park’s purposes and duty. It provides the strategic context to more specific plans such as the Local Development Framework and other topic- or area-specific plans and strategies that will help deliver the Plan’s ambitions and goals.
The Management Plan sets out an overarching 20 year vision and is divided into three sections - the two national park purposes “sense of place” and “access for all”, and the duty “communities and business”. Under each section a set of ambitions, goals and a series of means to achieve were identified:
• The Ambitions seek to deliver the Vision for the National Park and contribute to the achievement of the National Park’s purposes and duty.• Goals set out the steps for achieving each ambition over the next five years, the progress of which will be measured in the State of the Park Report for Dartmoor• Means to Achieve are activities that will be undertaken over the next five years by a range of organisations in pursuit of the ambitions and support of the goals.
LUC, with the National Park Authority, was responsible for facilitating the process of preparing the Management Plan, and for drafting the Plan.
We substantiated the Management Plan by a literature review and a series of consultations with key stakeholders as well as separate meetings with National Park officers. In a set of workshops covering the purposes and duty with stakeholders, we firstly reviewed the emerging vision, Dartmoor special qualities and issues, secondly the draft ambitions and goals, and lastly the goals and means to achieve. A steering group guided the development of the plan, which was subjected to wider community consultation.
