I frequently heard of the coach going from Okehampton to Tavistock when I was a boy; and there was a ballad about it, of which I was able to recall a few fragments, which I completed and published along with the original air in my Songs of the West. As a child I remember the deadly fear that I felt lest I should be on the road at night, and my nurse was wont to comfort me by saying there was no fear of the "Lady's Coach," except after midnight.
In the vicarage garden are some very early inscribed stones collected from the neighbourhood. There is no token on them that they are Christian. Their inscriptions are:—
1. Neprani fili Condevi
2. Sabini fili Maccodecheti
3. Dobunii Fabri fili Enabarri.
This latter has on it also in oghans Enabarr. The second has the test word Mac for Map or Mab, indicative of Irish occupation. Moreover Dechet was a name, probably of a sept or tribe in Kerry, where several stones inscribed with the same name are found.[35]
The third is interesting, for Dobun was a faber or smith. In Celtic organisation every tuatha or tribe had its chief smith, and every fine or clan had its smith and forge as well, all whose rights and dues were determined by law; moreover, the head smith of the tribe was a man of very considerable consequence, social and political.
Dobuni, in the third, is the Latin for the genitive Douvinias, also a Kerry name. A stone at Ballintaggart bears an inscription to a son of Dobunus, Muccoidovvinias. Another stone of another son is at Burnham, also in Kerry, in Lord Ventry's collection. Here, then, we have written and engraven in stone for our learning the record of an Irish settlement from Kerry in the neighbourhood of Tavistock. If S. Rumon preached there he could preach in Gaelic and be understood.
Of the abbey of Tavistock there are but poor remains. Betsy Grimbal's tower in the vicarage garden was a gate-house, and takes its name from a woman who was murdered there by a soldier. A porch into the refectory or abbot's hall is the dairy of the "Bedford Inn." Some fragments of the monastic buildings are united and converted into library and municipal buildings, but they are dominated and oppressed by an architectural monstrosity—an absurd Town Hall in nondescript style.
The Drake statue is of bronze, and fine, in front of the Fitzford gate, and possesses the bas-reliefs on the base, in which the replica on Plymouth Hoe is deficient. Sir Francis Drake was born at Crowndale, the first farm down the Tavy valley. The old house has been destroyed. The Drakes were of yeoman origin in Whitchurch, nothing more. They laboured to prove a kinship to the ancient family of Drake of Ash, but failed, and Sir Francis Drake was granted an entirely new coat of arms.