Facing Page
Lydford Gorge[Frontispiece]
Wistman's Wood[8]
Two Bridges[16]
Ockery Bridge, near Princetown[20]
Clapper Bridge, Postbridge[24]
Brent Tor[29]
Tavy Cleave[33]
Widecombe on the Moor[40]
Dartmeet[48]
A Moorland Track, the Devil's Bridge[53]
Stone Avenue, near Merrivale[56]
A Dartmoor Stream[60]

Dartmoor is a fine-sounding name, and no one would wish to displace it; yet in one sense it is a misleading and inappropriate designation of the great central Devonshire moorland. The moorland is not distinctively the moor of the Dart, any more than of the Teign, the Tavy, or the Ockment; it is the cradle-land of rivers, and there is no obvious reason why the Dart should have assumed such supremacy. But there is historic fitness about the title. It is probable that the Saxons first became acquainted with Dartmoor from the fertile district known as the South Hams, watered by the beautiful reaches of the Dart from Totnes to its mouth. The wide intermediate waste that lay between the North and the South Hams was a region of mystery to them, and they associated it with this swift, sparkling stream that issued from its cleaves and bogs.

Whatever its actual population may have been, imagination would people it with spirits and demons; while it needed no imagination to supply the storms, the blinding fogs and rains, the baying wolves that haunted its recesses. They were content to retain its old Celtic name for the river, and they applied this name to the moor as well; it became the moor of the Dart. The name Dart, supposed to be akin to Darent and Derwent, is almost certainly a derivative from the Celtic dwr, water. The moorland itself is a mass of granite upheaved in pre-glacial days, weathered by countless centuries into undulating surfaces, pierced by jagged tors, and interspersed with large patches of bog and peat-mire. This is the biggest granitic area in England, the granite extending for about 225 square miles; though that which is known as Dartmoor Forest (never a forest in our accepted meaning of the word) is considerably smaller, having been much encroached upon by tillage and enclosure. There is a further protrusion of granite on the Bodmin Moors, and again as far west as Scilly; while Lundy, in the Bristol Channel, belongs almost entirely to the same formation. Beneath the mire and peat, which are the decaying deposits of vegetable matter, lies a stratum of china-clay, which is worked productively to the south of the moors, and still more largely in Cornwall. The average height of the moorland is about 1500 feet, rising in places to a little over 2000. This elevation is exceeded in Wales, in the Lake District, and in Scotland; and nowhere does Dartmoor appear actually mountainous, one reason being that the plateau from which we view its chief eminences is always well over 1000 feet above sea level, and thus a great portion of the height is not realized. But we realize it to some extent when we notice the speed of the moorland rivers; they do not linger and dally like Midland streams, they run and dash and make a perpetual music of their motion. In winter they are strong enough to make playthings of the rough lichened boulders that confront their course; and in the hottest summers they never run dry—the mother-breast of Dartmoor has always ample nourishment. Though there is a lessening in the body of the rivers, and perhaps a surface-drought of the bogs, the moors are never really parched; drovers from the Eastern counties sometimes bring their flocks hither in a summer of great heat, to feed on Dartmoor turfs when their own home-pastures would be arid. Yet the central moor is more like a desolate waste than a pasture. Its rugged turfy surface is scattered with small and large fragments of granite, sometimes "clitters" of weather-worn boulders, sometimes masses that look as though prehistoric giants had been playing at bowls. Often strange and fantastic in shape, as twilight steals on, or the weird gloom of moorland fog, they seem to become animated; they are pixies, brownies, the ghosts of old vanished peoples; wherever we gaze they start before us; prying figures seem to be hiding behind them, ill-wishing us, or eager to lure us into desolate solitudes. The wind sighs with solitary tone through the rough grasses and tussocks; at this height its evening breath is chill even in summer. Some of the stones are shattered monuments of dead men; some perhaps had a religious significance that the world has forgotten. The loneliness of the moor is often a charm, but it can become oppressive and terrible if our mood is not buoyant. In places like these the strongest mind might yield to superstition. We seem to be in a region of the primal world, where ploughshare has never passed nor kindly grain sprung forth for the nourishment of man.

Wistman's Wood
(Page 13)

But we do not come to Dartmoor for traces of the earliest man in England; for these we must go to Kent's Cavern, Torquay, or to Brixham, not to the moors. Tokens of habitation on Dartmoor only begin with Neolithic times, and are by no means continuous. At one time there must have been a thick population; but Celt and Saxon have left little trace on the moors, and the Romans none at all. Though the Celts may have conquered the Iberian tribes here, they probably neither exterminated nor entirely dispossessed them. They were content with the fringes of the wilderness, leaving the rest to the mists, the wolves, and the lingering older race. It was man of the New Stone Age who first peopled this upland, leaving remains of his hut-dwellings, his pounds, dolmens, and menhirs, his kistvaens and his cooking-holes. Numerous as the remains are still, they were once far more so; they have been broken up or carted away for road-mending, for gateposts and threshold stones, for building, for "new-take" or other walls, and for any other purpose to which granite can be applied. This central highland may have become a refuge of the later Stone-men against invaders of better equipment: all the traces of camps are on the borders, defensive against an external enemy; within is no sign of anything but peaceful pastoral occupation and tin-streaming.

Place names, of field or of farm, enable us to infer the former existence of primitive relics: wherever there is a Shilstone (shelf stone) or a Bradstone (broad stone) we may be sure there was once a dolmen or cromlech; wherever there is a Langstone or Longstone we guess at a menhir or standing-stone. These early inhabitants of the moor had advanced far from the condition of the rude cave folk; they built themselves low circular huts, generally clustered within pounds (enclosures whose chief purpose here seems to have been the protection of cattle; some of the pounds were clearly for cattle alone). At Grimspound, near Hookner Tor, are traces of twenty-four huts, enclosed in a double wall 1500 feet in circumference. The huts had low doorways, and usually platforms for domestic purposes, with hearthstones and cooking-holes. The food to be cooked was placed in the hole, sometimes in a coarse clay pot, sometimes without, together with red-hot stones from the hearth. Near Postbridge as many as fifteen pounds can be traced, while at Whit Tor are other numerous traces. Those at Grimspound evidently belong to the Bronze Age; like different periods of architecture, the Stone and Metal Ages very much overlapped.

At first the burial of these people was in dolmens, like the fine specimen at Drewsteignton; later, cremation became the fashion, and the smaller kistvaen, or stone chest, was used. The kistvaen was covered by cairns or heaps of stones, probably placed there in tribute to the dead: there are many relics of such on the moors, as in Cornwall, but they have usually been scattered or mutilated, and the contents rifled by seekers after buried treasure. The stone-circles on the moor are, of course, entirely dwarfed by Stonehenge, but when the problem of the greater is solved we shall know that of the lesser; at present we can only conjecture. The Scaur Hill circle on Gidleigh Common is a good specimen, being about ninety-two feet in diameter; near it are several stone-rows or alignments. Dartmoor is famous for these lines of standing-stones, which are generally connected with places of burial; the longest, on Staldon, starting from a circle, runs for over two miles. These, together with the single stones or menhirs, were probably intended as memorials of persons or events, and may also have been used as places of gathering; but their religious significance, if any, can have been little more than a primitive ancestor-worship. At a later period the menhirs were often converted into crosses, and as such they are common in Devon and Cornwall.

Other tokens of the early inhabitants are to be found in the signs of tin-working, but here we have to be careful in assigning dates; much tin-mining was done in the Middle Ages, and it is not always easy to distinguish between traces that date from many years before Christ and those that belong only to the fourteenth or the fifteenth century. The advance in methods of working and in mode of living was very slight, and it is quite possible to confuse a rude hut of the medieval tinners with one of prehistoric origin. We cannot positively state what period of the Bronze Age saw the dawn of tin-working on Dartmoor, but their place in the oldest folklore gives the "tinkards" a great antiquity. The metal was streamed, or washed from the beds of the moorland rivers, cast in rough ingots, and carried on pack horses to the Stannary or mintage towns, where it was stamped and taxed. Parts of the old trackways still remain, often paved; and it was for the use of the pack-horses that the characteristic clapper-bridges were constructed, like those of Dartmeet, Postbridge, and elsewhere. These bridges are quite modern when we compare them with the stone-circles and kistvaens. There was a kind of guild or early trade union between the miners of Devon and Cornwall, reminiscent of the time when both belonged to "West Wales"; and a relic of the old jurisdiction is the Stannary Court still meeting at Truro.