Dartmoor

by Arthur L. Salmon

We are reminded of London by the dedication of Widecombe Church, which is to St. Pancras; and thoughts of the metropolis again come to us at Hey Tor, which provided granite for London and Waterloo Bridges. These eastern heights, Rippon and Hey Tors, are not so lofty as those of the north-west, but they both command very fine views. It is magnificent to see sunset flame across the moors from this eastern borderland. Patches of cultivation, open moorland dotted with sheep, lovely river-valleys, and wide undulations of heather and gorse fade into horizons of the westward summits. There is always the changeful charm of atmosphere. The scene may be of vast, glorious peacefulness, but it is great also when there is the confusion of cloud-strife, rain raking the hillsides—when the spirit of the moor is abroad in storm and darkness, when colour is quenched in wet and driving wrack. It is easy then to picture the moor as the phantasmal haunt of lost races. Dartmoor has many moods, variable as the soul of man—sometimes of gentle pensiveness and dreaming, touched with sentiment, sometimes of fierce striving passion or inconsolable woe, sometimes of desolation deepened to despair. In all these there is a quality of the unconventional and untamed, a sense of the nearness of mystery, the brooding of the unseen, the force of powers that we sometimes feel to be in profoundest sympathy with our own longings and imaginings, sometimes in the most vexed antagonism. Here, as elsewhere, we find very much what we bring, but we find it intensified, vivified; it may lure us as a kindly home, or repel us as a desert. Even the repulsion has its own manner of charm, because it braces us to self-assertion and manhood.

It was from this Hey Tor side of the moorland that William Howitt once looked forth upon Dartmoor. He tells us: "My road wound up and up, the heather and the bilberry on either hand shewing me that cultivation had never disturbed the soil they grew in; and one sole woodlark from the far-ascending forest to the right filled the wild solitude with his autumnal note. At that moment I reached an eminence, and at once saw the dark crags of Dartmoor high aloft before me, and one large solitary house in the valley beneath the woods. So fair, so silent, save for the woodlark's note and the moaning river, so unearthly did the whole scene seem, that my imagination delighted to look upon it as an enchanted land, and to persuade itself that that house stood as it would stand for ages, under the spell of silence but beyond the reach of death and change." This was written three-quarters of a century since, before nature had begun greatly to inspire our prose writers; and for its period it is very creditable. In poetry we have made no progress; but in the prose literature of nature—that is to say, of natural scenes viewed under human emotion—it is an immense step from the writings of William Gilpin and Richard Warner, and even of Howitt, to those of George Borrow and Richard Jefferies. Even in prose it had been the poets, Gray and Wordsworth, who had shown the way, very slowly followed. Warner was an enterprising and intelligent traveller, and visited many parts of the south and west from his Bath home, long before the time of railways. It is interesting to notice how he was daunted by Dartmoor. Overnight he had decided to walk from Lydford to Two Bridges, though the idea of "travelling twelve miles over a desolate moor, wild as the African Syrtes, without a single human inhabitant or regular track, had something in it very deterring". Next morning it actually deterred. "As the trial approximated, my resolution, like Acres' courage, gradually oozed away, and before breakfast was finished I had dropped the idea, and determined to take a circuitous route by Oakhampton." His landlord had just told him how the body of a dead sailor had been discovered in a lonely spot, where it must have lain for weeks; and Warner's discretion proved greater than his valour.

But we need not sneer at him. It is still easy to be lost on Dartmoor.

Those who are fond of logan-stones may find some in this district: there is one at Lustleigh, a fine one on Rippon, and others elsewhere. Some of them no longer "log" satisfactorily, and certainly none are connected with Druidic or other ceremonial. They are natural formations, like the rock-basins and the tors themselves.

It is more interesting to pass on to one of the loveliest portions of the moorland border, that which is watered by the Rivers Dart after their junction at Dartmeet. We have already seen the West Dart at Two Bridges, and the East Dart should be explored at least to Postbridge. It is especially beautiful where it is joined by the Walla, at the foot of Yes Tor. Dartmeet is a small settlement of houses, and deserves to be popular, for while quite on the moorland it has none of the desolate aspect that some persons find depressing, and those who love woods can get them to perfection around Holne and Buckland. Tourists who have been up the river from Dartmouth to Totnes are inclined to think that they know the Dart; they are as much mistaken as those who think they know the Wye when they have been to Symond's Yat. To know the Dart its moorland recesses must be explored, where the stream is in its fresh impetuous youth; below Totnes, though its banks are undoubtedly lovely, it has become chastened and sobered. At the junction of the Wallabrook with the Dart is a very fine view of Yar Tor, near which is the luxuriant Brimpts plantation.

The meeting of the two Darts is in a low rock-strewn gorge, to appreciate which the roadway must be left. Near is the Coffin-stone, with its inscribed crosses, used as a resting-place for the dead on their way to burial. It is said that when a man of notorious wickedness was being carried to his grave, his coffin as usual was rested on this stone, and a flash of fire struck downward from a passing cloud, consuming the body and splitting the solid rock. The cleft remains as a proof. The rocks of this district are frequently of metallic substance, and are often struck by lightning; perhaps this kills the romance of the legend.

Buckland-in-the-Moor, so called to distinguish it from other Bucklands, is not strictly on the moorland at all, and is cradled in woodland; it is a very small, delightful village, close to the united Webburns, which join the Dart below. The river here flows in most tortuous fashion under the beautiful woods of Buckland Drive and Holne Chase. Holne Cot has a place in literature as the birthplace of Charles Kingsley, in 1819, but he left it when an infant. Another literary remembrance is the birth of the dramatist Ford at Ilsington, and Tavistock had a true poet in William Browne; but it must be confessed that the literary glories of the moorland are not great, and Carrington, its special poet, is quite a third-rate writer. There has been no Wordsworth to interpret Dartmoor. We have to come to modern fiction, in the books of Mr. Baring-Gould and Mr. Phillpotts, for anything like an adequate literary treatment; and even in this department there has been no Lorna Doone.

At Holne and Buckland may be found some of the most luxuriant woodland of the moor-borders, yellow with dense primroses in the spring. On both sides of the river there are rich woods of birch and oak and fir, while in the valley through which the Dart runs are fertile succulent marshes, beautified with bogbeans, asphodels, and sundews, and with the exquisite Osmunda regalis flourishing where, happily, it is very difficult to reach. In parts the river flows through ivied crags, above which hang clusters of mountain-ash. There are prehistoric remains at Holne and at Hembury, but it is difficult to think of the past where the present is of such insistent charm. Moor, woodland, river, stone-strewn waste and fertile pasture here meet, with no discord or violent contrast, but harmonized by a reconciling atmosphere of beauty. The churches both at Buckland and Holne have very interesting screens, and at Holne is a finely-carved wooden pulpit.

Though it can scarcely be said to belong to the moors, Ashburton is a good starting-point for the examination of the eastern moorlands. Here and at Buckfastleigh are the only remains of the once extensive Devon woollen manufactures; and Ashburton was also at one time a Stannary town. It has a good church and many interesting associations, but we cannot linger either here or at Buckfast, where a settlement of Benedictines has restored the old abbey.

There is a great temptation to stay awhile at Dean Prior for the sake of Robert Herrick, one of England's sweetest lyrists, who was twice vicar here, being presented by Charles I in 1629, dispossessed at the Commonwealth, and reinstated at the Restoration. He abused the neighbourhood so heartily in his verse that it is surprising he should have accepted the living a second time; but perhaps he said a little more than he meant. The exact spot of his burial in the churchyard is unknown. Some of Herrick's lyrics are so lovely that even Devonians must forgive him, though he wrote: