Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts

by Rosalind Northcote

'I cannot tell what you say, rosy rocks,
I cannot tell what you say;
But I know that there is a spirit in you,
And a word in you this day.

'I cannot tell what you say, brown streams,
I cannot tell what you say;
But I know that in you too a spirit doth live,
And a word doth speak this day.

'Oh! green is the colour of faith and truth,
And rose the colour of love and youth,
And brown of the fruitful clay.
Sweet Earth is faithful, and fruitful and young,
And her bridal day shall come ere long,
And you shall know what the rocks and the streams
And the whispering woodlands say.'

Kingsley: Dartside.

Of all the rivers of Devonshire, the Dart claims the first place, both for beauty and for interesting associations; and between the lonely wastes about its source on Dartmoor, and the calm, broad reaches above Dartmouth, the scenery is not only always beautiful, but adds the great charm of being beautiful in quite different ways.

Drayton recognises the claim, for in the Poly-olbion, speaking of the 'mother of rivers,' Dartmoor, he says:

'From all the other floods that only takes her name
And as her eld'st in right the heir of all her fame.'

And a few lines later he makes Dart declaim:

' ... There's not the proudest flood
That falls betwixt the Mount and Exmore shall make good
Her royalty with mine, with me nor can compare;
I challenge anyone to answer me that dare.'

The East Dart rises about a mile south of Cranmere Pool, and at first makes its way through bare bogs, with great black holes gaping open here and there in the peat, tussocks of coarse grass and dry, rustling bents, isolated tufts of heather, and now and again wide spaces of waving cotton-grass. All around is 'an everlasting wash of air' and a sense of spaciousness, which it is to be hoped no cynically named 'improvements' may ever diminish. Westcote comments on the name. 'Of some it is supposed that the river takes name of the swiftness of the current; the like is thought of the river Arrow in Warwickshire, and of the Tygris in Mesopotamia, which among the Persians doth import a shaft.'