Origin of Okehampton obscure—The Ockments—Moor seekers—Okehampton Castle—French prisoners—Church—Belstone and Taw Marsh—Cranmere Pool—Tavy Cleave—South Zeal—Prehistoric monuments—An evening at the "Oxenham Arms"—The Oxenham white bird—Mining misadventures—"Old vayther"—Ecclesiological excursions—Early Christian monuments.
What brought Okehampton into existence? It is not fathered by the castle, nor mothered by the church. Both have withdrawn to a distance and repudiated responsibility in the stunted bantling. It "growed not of itself," like Topsy, for it did not grow at all; it stuck.
Sourton Down on the west, Whiddon Down on the east—where the devil, it is reported, caught cold—Dartmoor on the south, shut Okehampton in. It was open only to the wintry north, where population is sparse.
Formerly, once in the day, once only did the mail coach traverse the one long street, ever on the yawn, and this was the one throb of life that ran through it. No passenger descended from the coach, no meals were taken, no lodging for the night was sought. The mails were dropped and the coach passed away.
TAW MARSH
There were, in Okehampton, no manufacture, no business, no pleasure even, for it had no assembly balls, no neighbourhood. Okehampton was among towns what the earth-worm is in the order of animated nature, a digestive tube, but with digestive faculty undeveloped. Now all is changed. The War Office has established a summer barrack on the heights above it, and life—in some particulars in undesirable excess—has manifested itself. Trade has sprung up: a lesson in life—never to despair of any place, any more than of any man. It has an office to fill, a function to perform, if only patience be exercised and time allowed. But if Okehampton in itself considered as a town be ugly and uninteresting, the neighbourhood abounds in objects of interest, and the situation is full of beauty.
Two brawling rivers, the East and the West Ockments, dance down from the moors and unite at the town; and if each be followed upwards scenes of rare wildness and picturesque beauty will be found.
It is towered over by Yes Tor and Cosdon, two of the highest points on Dartmoor, and some of the moor scenery, with its tumbled ranges of rocky height, is as fine as anything in the county of Devon.