A book of the west. Volume 1, Devon

by S. Baring-Gould

TAVY CLEAVE

Some of those who have been brought up on the moor cannot endure to leave it. One man named John Hamlyn, who died aged eighty years, had never in all his life been off it. Another, Jacob Gorman, aged seventy-five, had been from it only two months in all his life. At a little cot near Birch Tor, it was said that the fire had not gone out for a hundred years, as the women had never for a night left the house.

Some of the old cottages on the moor were wonderful abodes, like Irish cabins. They are gradually disappearing, but a few still remain. The influx of visitors to Dartmoor, and the money brought there, tend to their effacement. A cot that could be run up between sunrise and sunset and a fire lighted by nightfall, has been held to constitute a right for ever to the place. Some of the hovels still standing have been so erected.

The rivers on the moor are liable to freshets. In the notable storm of 1890, Merivale Bridge on the Walla, and the old bridge leading from Tavistock to Peter Tavy over the Tavy river, were swept away. But the Dart is notorious for its sudden swelling. It was due to this that the old couplet ran—

"River of Dart, O river of Dart,
Every year thou claimest a heart."

The river "cries" when there is to be a change of wind. "Us shall have bad weather, maister; I hear the Broadstones a crying." The Broadstones are boulders of granite lying in the bed of the river. The cry, however, hardly comes from them, but from a piping of the wind in the twists of the glen through which the turbulent river writhes.

In Dartington churchyard there is a tombstone to the memory of John Edmonds, who was drowned in the river on August 17th, 1840. He and his intended were coming from Staverton Church, where they had been married, when a wave of water rolled down on them, and cart, horse, and bride and bridegroom were swept away. Her body was found caught in a tree a few hundred yards below, but the body of the man was not recovered for nearly three weeks afterwards; the horse and cart were carried over the weir near Totnes bridge.