Small Talk at Wreyland. Third Series

by Cecil Torr

In digging for foundations on Bell Hill—the part of South Street between the turnings into Guinea Street and Bear Street—the workmen came upon some tesselated pavement, broken bits of Samian ware, and part of a sistrum of Egyptian green-glazed porcelain. That was in 1833, and the sistrum is now in Exeter Museum. It has the usual head of Hathor (or Isis) on each side, and below that a column of hieroglyphic, reading “neter nefer, neb taui, ...” on one side, and “nesu-bat (Ra ...)” on the other. The lower part was not found. Many Egyptian kings had cartouches beginning with ‘Ra’; but the glazing of the sistrum shows that it was made for one of the kings of Dynasty XXVI somewhere about 600 B.C.

This head of Isis being found upon Bell Hill, some rash antiquaries said that Bell was really Bel or Baal. But it is a fact that there are traces of outlandish gods in other parts of England. An inscription has been found at York (Corp. Inscr. Lat. VII. 240) recording the dedication of a temple to Serapis by the officer commanding the sixth Legion, which then was stationed there; and two altars have been found at Corbridge with Greek inscriptions (Inscr. Græc. XIV. 2553, 4) dedicating one of them to Astartê and the other one to Hercules of Tyre. There is a dedication to this Hercules in the Greek part of a bi-lingual inscription at Malta (Inscr. Græc. XIV. 600) and in the Phœenician part he is called Baal Melkarth of Tyre. This is the god at whom Elijah jibed, “he is on a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awaked.” He was the guardian of navigation: in the depth of winter all navigation ceased; and then he went to sleep and made no more journeys till the festival of his Awakening in the early spring.

Coins of Roman Emperors are sometimes dug up in this neighbourhood. In 1837 a little hoard of them was brought to light on Furzeleigh farm, three miles from here, while gravel and stone were being dug out to mend a road; and these were coins of Valerianus, Gallienus, Postumus, Victorinus, and Claudius Gothicus, whose short and stormy reigns began and ended between 253 and 270 A.D. Hoards are buried even now. Countryfolk lose money by bad investments or through the failure of a bank; and then there is a scare, and many of them convert their savings into coin, and hide or bury it. Burying is more secure: if money is merely hidden in the house, the missus may get hold of it and squander it away—at least, an old man told me so. He buried his (somewhere on Dartmoor, I believe) and in 1917 he had a stroke and died without ever telling anybody where it was. And some day somebody will come upon this hoard of three or four hundred gold coins of Queen Victoria and King Edward. The coins at Furzeleigh may have been buried there by such a man some sixteen centuries before; and possibly they represent his savings, or possibly his robberies and thefts.

Apart from coins, there are few relics of the Romans in any part of Devon excepting Exeter; and the coins may only prove that there was plundering or trade. A century before the Romans came, Diodoros was writing (V. 22) of the natives of these parts as kindly, mannerly folk, accustomed to dealing with foreigners over their trade in tin. Such people would make good neighbours, and could be left alone. At the date of the Antonine Itinerary the Roman roads did not come further west than Exeter, and probably were not carried on to Land’s End until the reign of Constantine—his name is on a Roman mile-stone at Saint Hilary, and his colleague’s name, Licinius, is on another at Tintagel. That was more than 250 years after Britain was annexed by Claudius; and the wonder is that the Romans did not make the road before, or that having left it for so long, they should have made it then. Something must have happened just before to give occasion for it; and I would hazard a guess that ‘something’ was the subjugation of Britain by Constantius in 296 A.D. after Carausius and Allectus had held the country for nine years.

The natives here were probably Iberians or Celtiberians, that is, wholly or partly of the old stock that the Celtic immigrants pushed back into the west. Tacitus observes in his Agricola, II, that the people in the west of Britain were so like Iberians that anyone would think their ancestors had come from Spain. He wrote this in 98 A.D., and would have heard it from Agricola himself, who was many years in Britain. No doubt, there was a likeness; but there is another explanation of it—the Iberians had once migrated westward like the Celts, and some of them migrated into Britain and others into Spain. That seems more likely than migration here from Spain.

In the Colonies and India there are races quite impervious to our civilization and living in their own ancestral way; and I imagine that these natives lived their own lives here regardless of the way the Romans lived. They were Prehistoric in the sense that they were living like primeval ancestors of theirs whose history is unknown; but they were not Prehistoric in the sense of having lived in that far past themselves, nor are their implements and buildings Prehistoric in that sense. Yet enormous dates B.C. are given to Prehistoric remains here which may not be much earlier than 300 A.D., or even as old as that.

Prehistoric remains may often be an obstacle to agriculture when they are in a field; and thousands of them must have been destroyed to make way for the plough. They are common enough on Dartmoor and other open land round here, and probably were just as common on the land that is enclosed. There are the remains of a little hamlet of hut-circles, with a rampart round it, on the open land in Lustleigh Cleave a mile from here; and in a field at Plumleigh, also a mile from here, there were six hut-circles in a group. When the granite boulders in the field were being cleared away, four bronze palstaves were found under one boulder and four under another, all standing up on end. (Two are now in Exeter Museum; and I remember others on a mantelpiece at Plumleigh, but cannot find out what became of them.) They were found in 1836; and the six hut-circles were destroyed soon after, to complete the clearance of the field. This is not an isolated case, but typical of what is always going on.

There is only one cromlech left in Devon—the Spinsters’ Stone. It is on a farm called Shilston, two miles from Drewsteignton, three from Chagford and nine from here. It consists of a flattish piece of granite about two feet thick and ten or twelve across, resting on three upright pieces about six feet high; and altogether it looks rather like a toadstool with three stems instead of one. In 1862 one of the uprights slipped away and let the top slide off, but the owner of Shilston had it set up again; and several people have set up menhirs that had fallen down. In such cases there can be no mistake; but I should not like to see a group of fallen stones set up by anyone who had a theory about Prehistoric things.

There were two rocks in the sea near Dawlish called the Parson and the Clerk; but the Parson perished in a gale. The sea had undermined him, and a big wave threw him down. There was no setting him up again, and the Dawlish people felt the want of him: so they ordained another rock as Parson with another for his Clerk. And if you go to Dawlish and inquire for the Parson and the Clerk, you will be directed to a couple of big rocks that lean up against a cliff; and there are pictures of these two imposters, not only on the post-cards but even in such books as the Devonshire volume of the Cambridge County Geographies.

The real Parson and Clerk were in the sea off Holecombe headland, half way from Dawlish to Teignmouth. They were big rocks, more or less of human shape; and the rock nearer to the headland was a good deal taller than the other rock further out. There was some point in calling them the Parson and the Clerk, as the Clerk’s place in churches was in front of the Parson and somewhat lower down; but there is no point in giving the name to these imposters, as they are of equal size and side by side like Siamese Twins. I remember the old Parson very well indeed, and sometimes feel the loss of him as if he were a personal friend. I fear that the old Clerk is doomed. He has lost his head, and now looks more like a mummied cat, as one sees him from the train.