‘It would be a thousand pities,’ said Lady Alice presently, turning towards Ethel, who sat beside her in the wagonette, ‘not to shew you the Stannaries—which are among our principal lions hereabouts—before the winter-storms set in. It is not always pleasant or quite safe to go so far into the moor after apple-harvest.’
‘But you forget,’ said Ethel, smiling, ‘that I, in my ignorance, have not the very faintest idea as to what Stannaries may be.’
‘Is it possible!’ exclaimed the child, turning upon her governess a glance of that pitying wonder with which the very young receive a confession of deficient information on the part of their elders. ‘Did you really never hear, Miss Gray, of our Cornish and Devon tin-mines?—we call them Stannaries because stannum is the Latin word for tin, you know—which were worked, ever so many hundreds and thousands of years ago, by Phœnicians and Carthaginians and Jews I believe, and Romans I am sure. Very ancient they are at anyrate, and very curious; and I want to shew you ours, the only ones in this part of Dartmoor, with the stone huts of the miners still standing, although no tin has been taken out of the lodes for many a long year.’
Ethel laughed good-humouredly at her own scanty stock of local lore.
‘I have read,’ she said gently, ‘of tin mines in Cornwall, and of that place with the odd name Marazion, which made people fancy the Lost Tribes were to be looked for somewhere near the Land’s End, and how the Phœnicians came of old in ships to fetch the tin away. But I did not know they came to Devon too.’
‘O yes; they did,’ persisted Lady Alice, eager for the credit of her county. ‘Our workings are quite as ancient as the great Cornish mines, though not so big. And there was once a Mayor of Halgaver, and a sort of diggers’ law on the moor, as there is among the gold-seekers in Australia now. I have heard Papa speak of it. But there is the farmhouse’—pointing to a dwelling, screened by black firs from the cold north-east winds, which crowned a swelling ridge of high ground—‘our explorings. You are a capital walker, and so am I; and the way to enjoy the moor and understand it is to cross it on foot.’
The pony, wagonette, and lad in livery being duly left at the farm, the two girls set off together to traverse the distance that intervened between the ridge on which the house was built and a bleak table-land from which cropped up, like fossil mushrooms, many gray stones of various shapes.
‘Those are the Circles—the Rounds as the poor people call them,’ said Lady Alice in her character of cicerone. ‘Nobody in these parts cares to be near them after dark. They are said to be haunted, but that is all nonsense of course.’
‘They look cold and ghostly enough even in broad daylight,’ said Ethel, as they pushed on along a broad smooth track of emerald green, one of several green belts that varied the dull purple of the sea of heather. Overhead, on tireless wing, the hawk wheeled. The lapwing, with complaining note, skirred the plain, striving with world-old artifice of drooping wing and broken flight, to lure away the human intruders from her flat nest, full of speckled eggs. The moorland hare, dark-furred and long-limbed, broke abruptly from her seat and galloped off unpursued. The Circles were reached at last, and proved to be quaint rings of dilapidated buildings, all of unhewn stone and of the rudest construction. Here and there the huts, roof and walls alike composed of rough slabs, were intact. Nothing could be more desolate than the appearance of these bare, gaunt hovels, reared by the hands of the long dead, standing solitary in the midst of a desert.
‘Here they lived once upon a time, those old people, the heathen miners, whose bronze tools and lumps of ore and morsels of charred wood are even now sometimes picked up by boys who hunt for birds’ eggs on the moor. They worked near the surface, and never drove their galleries very deep into the earth. And then came Christian times, when these hovels were inhabited by very different dwellers, until at last the mines were given up as no longer worth the labour of winning the tin.’