Remains belonging to the Neolithic Age, on the other hand, are not only much more abundant, but are of greater variety, showing an advance in knowledge of the arts of life, and they include not only axe-heads, spear-points, and arrow-tips of flint, in some cases beautifully finished, but weapons and ornaments of bone and horn, rude pottery, spindle-whorls, and even primitive musical instruments. No traces of the dwellings of the people of this age, except as regards the caves that sheltered some of them and their predecessors of the earlier time, have yet been found, nor of their graves, if we except the Spinster's Rock, two miles west of Drewsteignton. This is a dolmen consisting of three huge stones, on which rests a still larger block, twelve feet long and estimated at sixteen tons in weight; it doubtless was a Neolithic burying-place.
Dolmen near Drewsteignton
Relics of the Bronze Age are far more abundant, and they form, indeed, the chief archaeological feature of Devonshire. Dartmoor in particular, chiefly perhaps because its great upland wilderness has never been broken up by the plough, is dotted all over with remains of primitive Bronze Age dwellings, sometimes standing alone, sometimes grouped in villages and surrounded by a wall, and also with many stone circles, tumuli, kistvaens, menhirs, and rows of upright stones. It is, moreover, intersected by a network of ancient trackways, linking settlement to settlement.
Palstave of the Bronze Age
(In Exeter Museum)
The best example of an early Bronze Age village is Grimspound, eight miles north-east of Princetown. It consists of twenty-four round huts made of stone slabs set on end and standing about three feet above ground, scattered over a space of about four acres, surrounded by a nearly circular double wall, from nine to fourteen feet thick, and about five feet high, built of blocks of granite, some of which are tons in weight. Half the huts contain fire-hearths, which have been much used; and a good many have raised stone benches, from eight inches to a foot high. Except that the roofs, which were no doubt made of poles and thatch, have disappeared, these primitive dwellings, of which there are hundreds on Dartmoor, are probably much in the same condition as when they were inhabited, perhaps 2000 years ago. It has been suggested that Grimspound, like many ancient camps or hill-forts, was a place of refuge in times of danger, rather than a permanently occupied fortress.