Devonshire was peculiar in having no forests except that of Dartmoor, which was devoid of trees except a small portion called Wistman's Wood in the centre, but the trees in this looked so old and stunted as to make people suppose they had existed there since the time of the Conquest, while others thought they had originally formed one of the sacred groves connected with Druidical worship, since legend stated that living men had been nailed to them and their bodies left there to decay. The trees were stunted and only about double the height of an average-sized man, but with wide arms spread out at the top twisted and twined in all directions. Their roots were amongst great boulders, where adders' nests abounded, so that it behoved visitors to be doubly careful in very hot weather. We could imagine the feelings of a solitary traveller in days gone by, with perhaps no living being but himself for miles, crossing this dismal moor and coming suddenly on the remains of one of these crucified sacrificial victims.
Not far from Wistman's Wood was Crockern Tor, on the summit of which, according to the terms of an ancient charter, the Parliament dealing with the Stannary Courts was bound to assemble, the tables and seats of the members being hewn out of the solid rock or cut from great blocks of stone. The meetings at this particular spot of the Devon and Cornwall Stannary men continued until the middle of the eighteenth century. After the jury had been sworn and other preliminaries arranged, the Parliament adjourned to the Stannary towns, where its courts of record were opened for the administration of Justice among the "tinners," the word Stannary being derived from the Latin "Stannum," meaning tin.
Some of the tors still retained their Druidical names, such as Bel-Tor, Ham-Tor, Mis-Tor; and there were many remains of altars, logans, and cromlechs scattered over the moors, proving their great antiquity and pointing to the time when the priests of the Britons burned incense and offered human victims as sacrifices to Bel and Baal and to the Heavenly bodies.
There was another contingency to be considered in crossing Dartmoor in the direction we had intended—especially in the case of a solitary traveller journeying haphazard—and that was the huge prison built by the Government in the year 1808 on the opposite fringe of the Moor to accommodate prisoners taken during the French wars, and since converted into an ordinary convict settlement. It was seldom that a convict escaped, for it was very difficult to cross the Moor, and the prison dress was so well known all over the district; but such cases had occurred, and one of these runaways, to whom a little money and a change of raiment would have been acceptable, might have been a source of inconvenience, if not of danger, to any unprotected traveller, whom he could have compelled to change clothing.
We therefore decided to go round the Moor instead of over it, and visit the town of Plymouth, which otherwise we should not have seen.
The whole of Dartmoor was given by Edward III to his son the Black Prince, when he gave him the title of Duke of Cornwall after his victorious return from France, and it still belonged to the Duchy of Cornwall, and was the property of the Crown; but all the Moor was open and free to visitors, who could follow their own route in crossing it, though in places it was gradually being brought into cultivation, especially in the neighbourhood of the many valleys which in the course of ages had been formed by the rivers on their passage towards the sea. As our road for some miles passed along the fringe of the great Moor, and as the streams crossed it in a transverse direction, on our way to Plymouth we passed over six rivers, besides several considerable brooks, after leaving the River Dart at Totnes. These rivers were named the Harbourne, Avon, Lud, Erme, Yealm, and Plym, all flowing from Dartmoor; and although there was such a heavy rainfall on the uplands, it was said that no one born and bred thereon ever died of pulmonary consumption. The beauty of Dartmoor lay chiefly along its fringes, where ancient villages stood securely sheltered along the banks of these streams; but in their higher reaches were the remains of "hut circles" and prehistoric antiquities of the earliest settlers, and relics of Neolithic man were supposed to be more numerous than elsewhere in England.
There was no doubt in our minds that the earliest settlers were those who landed on the south coast, and in occupying the country they naturally chose positions where a good supply of water was available, both for themselves and their cattle. The greater the number of running streams, the greater would be the number of the settlers. Some of the wildest districts in these southern countries, where solitude now prevailed, bore evidence of having, at one time, been thickly populated.
We did not attempt to investigate any of these pretty valleys, as we were anxious to reach Plymouth early in order to explore that town, so the only divergence we made from the beaten track was when we came to Ivybridge, on the River Erme. The ivy of course flourished everywhere, but it was particularly prolific in some parts of Devon, and here it had not only covered the bridge, over which we crossed, but seemed inclined to invade the town, to which it had given its name. The townspeople had not then objected to its intrusion, perhaps because, being always green, it was considered to be an emblem of everlasting life—or was it because in Roman mythology it was sacred to Bacchus, the God of Wine? In Egyptian mythology the ivy was sacred to Osiris, the Judge of the Dead and potentate of the kingdom of ghosts; but in our minds it was associated with our old friend Charles Dickens, who had died in the previous year, and whom we had once heard reading selections from his own writings in his own inimitable way. His description of the ivy is well worth recording—not that he was a poet, but he once wrote a song for Charles Russell to sing, entitled "The Ivy Green ":
Oh! a dainty plant is the ivy green.
That creepeth o'er ruins old!