By the Editor.
No county of England is richer in historic associations and romantic memories than Devonshire, whose sons have proved themselves on many a stubborn day as brave as its daughters are proverbially fair. We may go further, and say that no English shire is richer, and only a few as rich, in those pre-historic remains which will always exercise a weird fascination over cultivated minds that would hold it sin to be incurious as to the beginnings, or, rather, the age-long development, of man upon the earth. The great mausoleum of these remains is Dartmoor, with its menhirs, its logans, its cromlechs (or dolmens), its circles and avenues, and its famous clapper-bridge; but all over the county are specimens of the typical round barrow, encrusted with hoar legends, and possessing, in addition, their strict scientific interest. The legends attach themselves to the individual barrows; the scientific problem is concerned with the almost unvarying form and type. Briefly, it may be stated that the Devonshire round barrow is a late variety of the cairn; the long barrow, which is numerously represented in the neighbouring county of Dorset, being older and corresponding to the long-headed race which preceded the round-headed Kelts in the occupation of Britain. The difference is between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, to which the round barrows belong and bear witness. To the Stone Age are assigned the chambered round barrows, the so-called giants’ graves, and the stone kists of Lundy Island.
Roughly contemporary with the typical round barrows are those mysterious remains in the great central waste, to which allusion has already been made. Just as false systems of astrology were elaborated before the dawn of clear scientific knowledge, so during the eighteenth century a complete hagiology was constructed respecting these remains, which has become untenable in view of more rigorous historical, philological, and anthropological investigation. In other words, the accepted interpretation of these moorland wonders connected them more or less definitely with Druidism. The prism of imagination presented those hierarchs in crimson hues. If their functions included inhuman sacrifices, they themselves were far from being deficient in dignity. What says Southey in Caradoc?
Within the stones of federation there
On the green turf, and under the blue sky,
A noble band—the bards of Britain—stood,
Their heads in rev’rence bow’d, and bare of foot,
A deathless brotherhood.
But whether as priests or mere medicine men, the existence of Druids in Devon has yet to be proved. Drewsteignton derives its initial syllable, not from them, but from Drogo; Wistman’s Wood comes, not from wissen, but is more probably uisg-maen-coed disguised in modern garb. And, as for those basins on the summits of the Dartmoor tors, they are purely natural. So the whole delightful edifice which Polwhele was at such pains to build up, and which Mrs. Bray described to the sympathetic Southey, topples down, or, rather, vanishes into thin air, leaving not a wrack behind.