There is a curious circle at Dûris in the Lebanon valley, and I went to see it, 31 March 1882. It has eight upright stones, about twelve feet high and six apart, with others laid on top of them like lintels, as in the outer circle at Stonehenge. So far as a circle can be said to point to anything, this circle points to Mecca, a Roman sarcophagus being set up on end in one of the intervals between the uprights, and thus forming a niche for the mihrâb. The uprights are drums of columns and the lintels are squared stones, evidently taken from a temple or some other building of Greek or Roman times. So the circle is comparatively modern, yet its builders were aiming at the same effect as the builders of Stonehenge.
Those rough stones on Dartmoor show no signs of high antiquity. The avenues might be tracks for driving sheep or cattle, and the circles might be pounds for penning them in; and some may really be no more than that. But the circles often have a grave in the centre, and the avenues sometimes have one at the end; and the graves have urns and implements and weapons as ancient as the Bronze Age or the last half of the Stone Age.
People are much too fond of giving those Ages definite dates, say 1500 or 1000 B.C. for the change from Stone to Bronze and 500 B.C. for the change from Bronze to Iron. In reality these Ages must have overlapped, surviving in some regions long after they died out in others; and there may have been people out on Dartmoor using bronze and flint long after Exeter was occupied by Romans.—A friend has given me a fancy portrait of some progenitor of mine out there denouncing their new-fangled notion of living in houses, instead of living in hut-circles as everybody should. I think it was inspired by something that I said about the comfort of having good thick walls and thatch, instead of merely brick and slate, when the weather is either hot or cold.
These hut-circles differ from those other circles in being formed of granite slabs set up on edge and touching one another, whereas those others are formed of pillars standing some way apart and enclosing much more ground. They probably had roofs of poles and thatch, looking like bell tents, but the roofing has all gone. They are common enough in all the Dartmoor district—there must be some thousands of them there—and usually they are in little groups of three or four. Some of the larger groups have ramparts round them; and these are known as Pounds. The grandest is Grimspound, with an area of about four acres containing five-and-twenty huts; but it has rather lost its dignity in these last fifty years, as a good road was carried down the valley in 1874 and comes within three hundred yards of it.
These ancient dwellings are usually on the sheltered slopes of hills; and on the summits of the hills there are great mounds that mark the graves of kings or chiefs. Sometimes, looking at the view and seeing those mounds against the sky, I get the same uncanny feeling that comes over me at places in Egypt and Etruria—the whole living country is dominated by the dead. There are six of these graves within about two miles on the range of hills behind Grimspound; and when one of them was opened in 1872, the chieftain’s dagger was found—a blade of bronze and a pommel of amber with a pattern worked in gold.
On a grave in Moreton churchyard there is a little granite figure of a child with wings. A man from Cornwall was working in a quarry near there; and when his child died, he got a block of granite from the quarry and carved an angel out of that. It is a crude piece of work without any of the mechanical excellence of other monuments close by, yet it impresses me much more. I fancy that the genius of the place is present there and gazing up towards those solemn hills where the Giant’s Grave stands out against the sky.
In this district there are many granite crosses still remaining, though many have been broken up. Here in Lustleigh parish there is one at South Harton that has been cleft down the middle to make a pair of gate-posts, another one at Sanduck that was built into the porch of the house and came to light again when that was taken down, the top of another in a field near Higher Coombe, and the base for another by the road-side near the railway-station. The base has the coat-of-arms of bishop Grandisson of Exeter, 1327 to 1369. This cross, therefore, was ecclesiastical; but some were not. There was an inquiry at Brent on 25 August 1557 as to the boundary between Dartmoor and Brentmoor, and the commissioners certified that they had marked the boundary by setting up stone crosses. They probably thought that people were less likely to tamper with a cross than with a common boundary-stone.
Under cover of the War a great big painted crucifix has been set up in a churchyard about three miles from here. The early Christians never portrayed the crucifixion, and their successors idealized it—a majestic figure in regal robes with outstretched arms, to which the cross just formed a background. Then came the miserable type that we all know—a realistic study of a condemned man suffering the last penalty of what was then the law. There is no semblance of divinity about it; and in the countries where one sees it most, the Trinity that they invoke is Gesu-Maria-Giuseppe or Jésus-Marie-Joseph. The whole thing has become mundane.
The old granite crosses always have short arms, and may belong to a primæval type that had nothing to do with crucifixion. According to Cæsar (De bello Gallico, vi. 18) the Druids said that Dis was the ancestral deity of all the Celtic race; and figures of this deity have come to light. As his attribute he holds up a big sledgehammer; and I suspect his hammer was the prototype of all these crosses—the ancient symbol was retained, but with an altered meaning.
When these northern nations were converted, the new religion was grafted on the old; and the grafting was not always neatly done. The Anglo-Saxon kings all claimed descent from Woden, and he was once a god; but when they took up Christianity, they had to fit him in. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (855) knows better than the Pentateuch what happened in Noah’s Ark. That speaks only of Shem and Ham and Japheth; but Noah’s wife had another baby while she was on board—“se wæs geboren in thære earche Noe”—and this was Woden’s ancestor.