The record
The North Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team (Dartmoor Search and Rescue Team - Okehampton), based since 2017 at its rescue centre on the Exeter Road industrial estate in Okehampton, covers the north moor - Dartmoor's highest and wildest ground - as part of Mountain Rescue England and Wales. Its callout fleet has long been built around two long-wheelbase Land Rover Defender 110s, callsigns DART 51 and DART 61, kept prepared at all times. Each carries a stretcher in its roof rack, and DART 51 can additionally transfer a loaded stretcher, casualty and attendants internally; the vehicles work in everything from summer heat to the deepest snowfalls the South-West has seen.
DART 51 holds a special place in UK mountain rescue: after some twenty years with the team it was recorded as the oldest Land Rover still operational anywhere in Mountain Rescue England and Wales. In 2025 the team, with public fundraising support, bought a 2013 Defender 110 from Hampshire Search and Rescue - who wanted the vehicle to stay in search-and-rescue service - to begin replacing its longest-serving Land Rover while keeping the Defender formula the team depends on.
Like most MREW teams, the Dartmoor teams run their Land Rovers as marked rescue ambulances - white Defenders with high-visibility orange chequer and Battenburg markings, blue lights and 'Mountain Rescue' signage. The registry photographs show sister vehicles of other English teams (Bolton MRT and Bowland Pennine MRT) in the same national livery convention, as no freely licensed photograph of the Dartmoor vehicles themselves was located.
