Small Talk at Wreyland. Second Series

by Cecil Torr

In the summer of 1917 I found an old lady who had been missing for more than twenty-four hours. There were parties out in search of her, but they had all kept nearer home, not thinking that she would have wandered off so far. I ought really to have gone off on the search myself, but I had other things to do, and that was how I happened to see her.

Some summers ago two ladies took lodgings at a farm about a mile from here, and they went out after tea on the afternoon of their arrival. They did not come in, and people went out in search of them; and at dawn they were found sitting on the hillside, with their umbrellas up, and five-and-twenty bullocks standing round them in a circle, contemplating them.

Something of the same sort happened to two ladies whom I know, while they were staying in a Riviera town. On the morning of Ash Wednesday they were going to an early service at the English church, and on their way they met a party of revellers returning from some Carnival festivity, attired in costumes and masks. There must have been something about these ladies that filled the revellers with delight: it may have been a certain primness, or possibly it was their prayer-books. Whatever it was, the revellers just glanced at one another, made a circle and joined hands, danced round them in dead silence for a minute or two, and then went upon their way.

Out on Dartmoor the dancers should be pixies, and their footsteps ought to make a circle of fresh verdure on the turf. But a botanist assures me that pixies dance round Agaricus Oreadis, if they dance round anything at all. This is the plant that makes these circles, the fresh growth being further and further from the parent plant in each succeeding year.

There are other circles on the moor—great granite circles like Stonehenge, but not so big as that—and people say that these dance round, and they can tell you why. Thus, years ago nine maidens went to Belstone on the Beltane day and danced round naked in the noontide sun. (Beltane is May Day now, and we are more demure.) And the Nine Maidens were changed into nine granite pillars standing in a circle there. Every day at noon they try to dance, and some days they go dancing round.

I never saw a circle dance, but I once saw the avenue on Hurston Ridge do something very like it. It was a broiling day after a spell of wet, and a vapour went up from the peaty soil. In the shimmer of this I saw the rows of granite pillars all swaying and bobbing about like people in a country dance, and was quite prepared to see a couple make their bow and go off down the middle and up again.

These avenues and circles have lately been the victims of a theory that used to be applied to churches. Old churches in England usually face eastward, but seldom face due east; and the theory is that they face the point at which the sun rose on the day when the foundation-stone was laid, and this would be the feast-day of the patron-saint.

The avenue on Downtor is said to point to sunrise on April 29, and so also a line drawn through the centre of the circle at Merivale to a menhir about 300 yards away; and other lines are said to point to sunrise on other days about that time of year—Lockyer, Stonehenge, page 481, ed. 1909—the theory being that they pointed to the sunrise on the Beltane day—page 309. I presume the Beltane fires were what we call ‘swayling’ now, that is, burning off old gorse and heather to make way for fresh shoots that will be soft enough for beasts to eat. This swayling is done at any odd times now, and with insufficient care, fires often getting beyond control and burning down plantations of young trees; but in my early days it was done on Maundy Thursday with as much regularity as potato planting on Good Friday. It perhaps was done in former times on some fixed day about May 1, and that was Beltane day; but I fail to see why Beltane day should be picked out for setting up an avenue or circle, or why a circle should be used for marking a straight line.

Many of the Dartmoor avenues can never have faced the sunrise, as they point too much to northward or to southward of the east. And then the theory says—One side of the larger avenue at Merivale faced the rising of the Pleiades in 1400 B.C. and the other side faced their rising in 1580 B.C., the smaller avenue faced the rising of Arcturus in 1860 B.C., the avenue on Shovel Down faced the rising of Alpha Centauri in 2900 B.C. and the avenue at Challacombe faced its rising in 3600 B.C., and so on with many more—pages 483, 484. The church theory has an intelligible base—the saint’s-day sunrise—though the base is insecure; and the Beltane sunrise is intelligible also, though still more insecure: but this stellar theory has no base at all. You pick out any star you please and get a date accordingly.

Looking out on Dartmoor with its rain and mist and fog, it seems improbable that anyone would trouble much about the stars out there, or take them as a guide in setting up an avenue. The ancient Egyptians may have done such things in their pellucid air, and theorists say they did; but that, I think, is a mistake. The rising of Sirius is recorded in inscriptions of Rameses II and VI and X—engraved in Lepsius, Denkmaeler aus Aegypten, part 3, plates 170 and 227 to 228 bis—and these inscriptions cover a length of time in which the rising would have varied a good deal, yet the variation is ignored. The entries cannot have been based on observations—otherwise the variation would appear—and this Rising of Sirius must have been as great a fiction as our ecclesiastical Full Moon that gives the date for Easter.