WHEN the moorland fog swirls in thick as soup it is possible to drive through Princetown and miss it. Yet when the lowlands are laced with early morning mist Princetown floats serenely above the rest of the world gilded by sunlight.

It is a place of compelling opposites. In winter it can be transformed into a white beacon where families from suburbia flock out to sleigh and throw snowballs. In summer it attracts tourists because of its prison and particular moorland character.

The highest town in England, Princetown is perched 1,400 feet above sea level, a wild and windy place where the climate swings between balmy and foreboding.

For the people who live in the heart of the community and in the surrounding villages there is a strong sense of belonging. Here is not all prison walls of grim granite but a place of dramatic moorland and pleasant surprises.

?The Book of Princetown ? Thomas Tyrwhitt?s Dartmoor Town? by Christopher Gardner-Thorpe (Hallsgrove £19.95) is a splendidly researched and superbly illustrated tribute to the place and its people.

A keen walker and lover of Dartmoor, the author has special connections with the village of Rundlestone, just north of Princetown.

Much of the town is intricately bound up with the prison and those who work in it, and the layout and buildings have mostly evolved from the prison and its community.

As much has already been written about Princetown in academic tomes this publication deftly sidesteps such repetition and focuses on the local community. As a result it risks being accused of being parochial in content yet here is its charm.

The book is based largely on pictorial history and is laid out as if the reader were setting off on a journey from Princetown Square.

Childhood memories abound among those still living in Princetown and others who have moved away. It is this and the fascinating collection of photographs that provide a rich and revealing annecdotal insight into the community as it was and is now.

Granite workings helped the town survive and it has thrived as a result of its proximity to Dartmoor Prison and through tourism.

The Princetown we know today owes its beginnings to Thomas Tyrwhitt (1762-1833).

His ambition was to build a small community that would become virtually self-sufficient. He gave it the name Prince?s Town.

In 1806 he laid the foundation stone for the prison. In 1833 the steam railway arrived via a branch line from Yelverton.

Sometimes youngsters alighted at King?s Tor Halt and ran downhill to meet the train at Ingra Tor after it had completed a large descending curve around the tor.

When they were too slow the train would arrive first and wait for the breathless passengers to rejoin. On one occasion, so the author tells us, the train driver lost his false teeth. He stopped the train to retrieve them ? enlisting passengers to help in the search!

A number of photographs nostalgically show Dartmoor ponies wandering around the centre of Princetown hoping for tit-bits from admiring visitors. All such scenes ended once the cattle grids were installed.

The town?s old Police Station is now the home of a fish and chips cafe, and the Imperial Hotel, which later saw serice as the Post Office until it was demolished, was a Temperance Hotel ? a meeting place for those who did not consume alcohol.

The Imperial Hotel was used during the First World War as a site in which sphagnum moss, collected from the moor, was treated and dried. This was used as a dressing for wounds.

Also, during the First World War the old Methodist Chapel was used for the preparation of iodine obtained from weeds collected on the moor.

One of Princetown?s enduring premises Lord?s Cafe, was constructed during the late 1930s by stonemason Herbert R Lord (1872-1961) following his return from America with his fortune.

Another popular landmark is the Plume of Feathers ? the oldest building in the town and built by Thomas Tyrwhitt for agricultural workers in 1785. The fields behind were used as a campsite for the workers building the prison from 1806 to 1809. Crockery and clay pipe remnants that appear from the subsoil are often found in molehills.

This book is a veritable treasure trove of absorbing nuggets, be it in the text, enlightening captions of the information to be savoured in the wealth of illustrations.

Turn the pages and you become fascinated by the community and a town that, while not chocolate box beautiful, has a strength and rugged charm that is compulsively engaging.