30-60 million years ago Dartmoor would have been covered in dense subtropical forest whereas now it features rolling plains and high moorland attracting millions of visitors every year. year to this National Park (Dartmoor National Park Authority, 2004). Over the last century, advances in science and geology have allowed us to trace Dartmoor's previous environment and observe the dramatic ways in which the climate has changed. The word “climate” describes long-term weather patterns. Meteorologists determine 'climate' by taking weather measurements over a 25-year period and calculating averages (Dartmoor National Park Authority, 2005). Dartmoor appears to be a landscape relatively unchanged by humans, except for a few stone walls and visible roads. However, if you look closer, you see hills, gullies and indentations, they mark the landscape and are the remains of the tinkers who scoured the landscape, the record of intense mining activity in the past (Harris, 1968). All of this raises the question: how have climate and humans influenced the Dartmoor landscape we see today? This work initially focuses on how Dartmoor's subtropical and arctic climates have affected the landscape of bulls and rivers and then continues with how humans have affected Dartmoor with peat and mining. To look at Dartmoor's previous climate and recreate the past we need to use pollen analysis. The pollen comes from plants thousands of years old, which were buried in the boggy recesses of the moorland. Pollen is found in moorland peat as pollen is transported by wind and insects to boggy areas of moorland (Dartmoor National Park Assosication, 2005). Using extensive knowledge of plants we can determine the species that lived on the moorland in the past and therefore we can identify...... middle of paper......r 5,000 years, meaning that farmers have created and maintained large part of the Dartmoor landscape working the land. In the Middle Ages, farmers divided land planted with rye and oats by dividing the land into narrow strips. These farmers also originated the corn ditch, which was a way of separating common grazing and enclosed lands by a ditch and a vertical stone-lined embankment that discouraged livestock from entering the fields from the moorland. Over the years the only agricultural land to have been improved is the surrounding land which has been reseeded and fertilized to obtain hay and silage. Today 90% of the territory is used for agriculture, both in open and closed moors where flocks graze. This is a marginal mountain agricultural area, which means that profits and animal production per hectare are low or sometimes zero due to heavy rainfall, low temperatures, poor soil and exposure to winds.