Woman 'first to walk all Dartmoor tors' for rescue charity

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Emily Woodhouse
Image caption,

Emily Woodhouse celebrated her 25th birthday by trekking around Dartmoor

A woman has walked nearly 200 miles (300km) across a national park to raise money for charity.

Emily Woodhouse, 25, has spent the past 10 days visiting all the tors on Dartmoor and says she could be the first person to do it.

The trek was to mark the 50th anniversary of the Tavistock section of the moor's search and rescue team.

She has slept out alone on Dartmoor every night and finished in Princetown on Tuesday.

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Emily says she is not sure if she is the first person to visit every tor, which is a "prominent rock or heap of rocks", because everyone has a different definition of what they are, and therefore how many there are on Dartmoor.

She says she used her own methodology, finishing up with 119 tors, which meant Kestor Rocks, Foggintor and Hay Tor were not included.

"The first thing I did was to look at a 1:50 map of Dartmoor and underlined everything that said 'something space tor' and then went from there, drawing lines between the bits that I knew were good routes," she said.

Image caption,

Fog caused Emily problems navigating on Dartmoor

Emily, who is from Tavistock, says the bad weather in Devon over the past few weeks made the challenge harder.

"When you're getting really tired, it's hard to keep going and keep making sure you're making the best decisions," she said.

Image caption,

Down Tor overlooks Burrator Reservoir on Dartmoor

"The weather's been awful, it's been rainy and foggy. I was never expecting it to be difficult finding some of the tors when I planned the route."

Emily is trying to raise £5,000, which will buy new waterproof jackets for Dartmoor Search and Rescue.

The Tavistock branch was set up after the deaths of two army officer cadets, who died from hypothermia and exhaustion in 1967 while taking part in an overnight patrolling and map-reading exercise on Dartmoor.

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