There have been many studies of ‘industries in the countryside’, by famous authors such as Joan Thirsk and David Hey, and many publications on rural industrial archaeology. This book on the history of gunpowder manufacture, at the Plymouth and Dartmoor Gunpowder Company’s factory near Princetown, Dartmoor (in the parish of Lydford, Devon), ranks among the most evocative and readable accounts of the subject. Dartmoor, contrary to sweeping appearances, was the location for a number of important industries, such as tin, arsenic, ice, china clay, wool and paper manufacture, and gunpowder was among these industries. Production at this famous site extended from 1844 to 1897. Linked to gunpowder, of course, were other industries, notably involving water management – on which this book’s author is especially knowledgeable – and cooperage to make the specially adapted, leather-clad barrels for gunpowder. Gunpowder was much used locally, for example in tin mining, or by farmers clearing rocks from their farms. Drew Campbell’s exceptional and well-referenced book is an excellent account of this Dartmoor industry. It also contains dramatic photography by Dianne Giles, and fine line illustrations by Penny Campbell.

The industry was highly dangerous, notorious for deadly explosions and problematic for the storage of gunpowder. Its storage magazines had to be located at least a mile from any town, making Dartmoor very suitable. Every possible effort was made to avoid sparks of any kind, and this involved the wearing of leather slippers, avoidance of grit, the use of wooden and copper tools, prohibition of tobacco, and the like. There were also concerns that the product could fall into certain hands: many local disaffected protesters in the south-west in 1848, for example, or Irish nationalists. Some accounts of the remnants of human beings, post-explosions, make for harrowing reading. Even the architecture of the site was designed with these explosions in mind: making much use of heavy granite, and deploying tar-covered tarpaulin roofs for buildings, so that the force of explosions would be directed upwards.

Drew Campbell takes much notice of the people involved in the Dartmoor works: the investors, partners, managers and entrepreneurs, notably the promoter of the industry George Frean, and the workmen and their families. We learn of their origins and migration, the position of largely unemployed women and the education of children. It is a considerable merit of this book that these workpeople emerge so empathetically and vividly from the censuses, reports, poetry, folklore, newspaper accounts, and other records. In effect, this book is also a vivid story of the rise and fall of an industrial community, in a site not normally associated with such historic community studies.

There are telling accounts of the nineteenth-century factory inspectors and their view of this works, which was not always flattering. Yet it is interesting to note (contrary to some historical verdicts) how very concerned these inspectors were about the risks to life that such a factory posed to its workers. The smallest faults, down to cracks in the floorboards potentially containing dust, were highlighted as serious dangers.

Gunpowder was made from Sicilian sulphur, sodium nitrate from South America, and charcoal, and while some of the latter may have been produced locally it was thus, on Dartmoor, a very international enterprise. Coal and/or peat were also needed, along with a ready water supply. The industry gradually declined in the later nineteenth century as dynamite (from c. 1867) became more popular and widely used. While some of these Dartmoor industrial habitations are still occupied, much of the hitherto works is an abandoned site, with the remains of at least eighteen interconnected buildings. To judge from employee numbers, its heyday centred around the 1861 and 1871 censuses. By 1891, very little remained of the earlier activity and the company was wound up in 1897.

In short, this book epitomises the very best form of social history and historical archaeology, a detective story of uncovering and repeopling the past, highly evocative yet erudite, beautifully written, illustrated and produced, and the kind of book that makes you wish for more like it, as one travels off to experience the researched Dartmoor site for oneself.