ROUND THE TORS.
If we journey on south-west beyond the chalk ranges of Wessex we come to a very different country indeed: we enter on a land of granite hills. The granite rocks are as different as possible from the chalk heights. Instead of rounded slopes, we see sharp, jagged peaks and broken, rocky ridges. The smooth, open stretches of turf are exchanged for wild, heathery moorland, broken by deep dells, and the waterless chalk slopes are replaced by glens, through which leap foaming torrents.
The granite hills rise to their wildest at Dartmoor, in the centre of the county of Devon. Dartmoor is a great tableland, from which spring granite heights rising to nearly 1,800 feet above the sea. For the most part Dartmoor is uncultivated, a wilderness of barren moorland, with lofty hills and jagged tors on every hand, here and there scored by narrow valleys, which are often strewn with huge boulders of granite.
The tors are huge knobs or humps of granite, and the word has the same meaning as "tower." The most famous of them all is Yes Tor. Round these tors stretch great sweeps of moor and morass. Nothing lives here save the moorland sheep, who crop the rough grass between the tufts of heather, and the hardy moor ponies—nimble, shaggy, little creatures, with long manes and tails, quick as deer and surefooted as goats.
In the midst of this desolate country stands a great prison—Dartmoor Convict Prison. The place was chosen so that no convict could hope to escape. Many of the prisoners go out by day to work in the fields around the prison. They are closely watched by warders armed with rifles. But for all that, now and again a convict makes an attempt to escape; yet, though he sometimes gets away from the warders and is free for a few hours, he is almost certain to be recaptured. He finds that he has only got into a larger prison—the prison of the moorland. There are no woods, so he cannot hide himself, and he cannot strike which way he pleases, for there are the bogs to think of.
In many places there are deep morasses in which a man would sink and be swallowed up by the soft mud. So the escaped prisoner dare not move by night lest he should run into a bog; then by day, if he attempts to traverse the country, he is soon seen; so that it is almost impossible to escape from Dartmoor.
Another stretch of country dotted with tors and covered with moorland is Exmoor, in the north of Devon. The hills of Exmoor are famous for their ponies and for being the haunts of the wild red-deer, which are sometimes hunted with staghounds.