My ladye is an ashen white,
As one that long is dead".
It is considered ill-omened to meet this lady, and those who would avoid doing so, as well as evade the firing, may find a pleasant refuge at Belstone, at Sticklepath, or at South Zeal. Belstone has a tor of 1568 feet in height, and also some standing-stones named the Nine Maidens, with their fallen piper. The girls were thus doomed and changed into stone as a punishment for dancing on Sunday. Though their piper is displaced and mutilated, they still dance each day at noon—for those whose faith is equal to the demand. Belstone is one of several "Bels" in the Dartmoor country, such as Bellever and Bel Tor, but we have yet to learn that they have any connection with Baal, in spite of all the nonsense that has been talked.
Tavy Cleave
(Page 27)
At Sticklepath, a charmingly pretty village with beautiful flower-gardens, there is a holy well with a curiously inscribed stone; while at South Zeal, near a quaint belfry, is an interesting wayside cross. There are some delightful old houses in the neighbourhood, usually manorial in their origin and now turned into farms, such as North Wyke, West Wyke, and Wykington. It is from this side that the ascent of Cosdon Beacon is often made—Cosdon, sometimes called Cawsand, being noted for the fine stone-rows and other immemorial relics to be found on its slopes. The Beacon has been introduced to literature by novels of Mr. Baring-Gould and Mr. Phillpotts. We are reminded also of fiction—the familiar pages of Westward Ho!—by the name of the Oxenham Arms, preserving the memory of a famous old Devon family, the Oxenhams, with their tradition of the white bird.
By whatever way we pass from Okehampton or South Tawton to Chagford, we are delayed on all sides by numberless spots of beauty or interest. The main road, which branches to Exeter, is served by a motor bus from Moreton, but familiarity with the moorland can never be gained by proceeding along a highroad, whether on foot or awheel. Many as are the remaining standing-stones, circles, and pounds, those that have been destroyed were far more numerous; but the finest monument of the "old people" is rarely as attractive as the natural beauties that surround many of them, and only the professed antiquarian will care to examine them all with patient study. To most of us they are only bare stones. They are so ancient that the human interest has died from them. But we find this human touch at such places as Wonson manor house, now a farm, where an ace of diamonds painted on the woodwork of a bedroom reminds us of a former squire, who had it placed there in order that he might curse it each night for the ruin it had brought him in his gambling.
Gidleigh, which is near, stands high, and has a fine park of oak, birch, and mountain-ash, with ferns and whortles in a rock-strewn undergrowth. Its colouring is especially rich in the fall of the year, with the lovely fading of ferns, the purple of heath, and the red of berries. The North Teign dashes foamingly below, fretful and rock-thwarted. This is really a more beautiful spot than ever was the Holy Street Mill that Creswick and other artists painted; plenty of picturesque mills may be found throughout the country, but scenes of such loveliness are rare. The rhododendrons in bloom add much to the beauty of Gidleigh, which also boasts a small castle with whose ruinous walls the ash trees have incorporated themselves.
At Teign Head (not quite the head of the river) is one of the moorland's clapper bridges; but Leigh Bridge, where the two Teigns meet, though of the common single-arch type, is more charming because its surroundings are wooded. The two rivers unite before reaching Chagford, and beyond that modernized and popular little resort the Teign passes out of the confines of the moor altogether. But at Fingle Bridge, one of the most famous Devon beauty-spots, something of moorland wildness still remains. Almost the whole course of the Teign is of remarkable beauty. It here passes the fine trees of Whiddon Park till it comes to a ravine every yard of which seems to be prehistoric dust. There are earthworks and camps on both sides; while not far off is the great dolmen or cromlech of Drewsteignton, near the small Bradmere pool.
Ancient camps are not common on the actual moorland, but we find them here at the fringe: those Bronze Age moormen appear to have been peaceable among themselves, and only to have raised entrenchments against external enemies. Possibly this lovely valley of the Teign saw a desperate struggle between tribes of an early and a newer civilization, one of the primitive race-strifes that shaped our people. Now it is a haunt of the country-lover and the tourist, many of whom deplore that the banks and hollows have been denuded of their rarer ferns by the depredations of thoughtless visitors. But nothing has killed the charm of the tumbling torrent, the stained massy boulders, the pools and shallows. It is little wonder that Chagford has become a popular holiday place; yet its miry condition in winter was best expressed by the pithy comment of its sarcastic neighbours—"Chaggy-vord—Good Lord!" The "Three Crowns", of which Kingsley spoke as a "beautiful old mullioned and gabled Perpendicular inn", was once a manor house.