History Talks Live!

Posted on 4 May 2023

UHI Centre of History at Burghfield is thrilled to welcome David C Harvey to deliver the talk, Myth, reality and romantic revelations: tracing a biography of heritage on Dartmoor (1638-2020) on Thursday 18 May, 5.30-6.30pm.

This paper explores the biography of an early-modern heritage narrative connected to a violent storm that occurred on 21st October 1638 in the village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor on Dartmoor (SW England). 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.

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.

Joining Instructions

We are thrilled to host this event with a hybrid approach, with the option of attending either in person at the Burghfield House, Dornoch, or online through Cisco Webex. 

This is a free event, but if you would like to attend in person, could you please reserve your place by emailing historyevents@uhi.ac.uk. 

For the online event, you can find further information and the joining link on our History Talks Live website.