Photo: Frith & Co., Reigate.
FINGLE BRIDGE (p. [38]).
Dartmoor is a much more prolific “mother of rivers” than Exmoor. In one of the loneliest and dreariest regions of the southern “forest,” no great way from its northern extremity, is the quagmire known as Cranmere Pool, and from this and the sloughs that surround it ooze all the more important of the Devonshire streams except the Exe and the Torridge. Out of Cranmere Pool itself—a prison, according to local legend, of lost spirits, whose anguished cries are often borne on the wings of the wind—the West Okement drains, to flow northwards to the Torridge; and at distances varying from half a mile to a couple of miles, the Teign, the Dart, the Tavy, and the Taw have their birth. The Okement will be noticed presently, when we have to do with the Torridge; of the other rivers, the TEIGN rises in two headstreams, the North and the South Teign, near Sittaford Tor. As is the way of these moorland waters, they are soon reinforced by tributary rills, among them the Wallabrook, which flows by Scorhill Down to join the North Teign. Scorhill Down has in its stone circle one of the most remarkable of those mysterious relics of an immemorial past in which Dartmoor abounds. At one time all such remains were regarded, like those at Stonehenge, as Druidical monuments, but this theory of their origin is no longer in fashion, and antiquaries now prefer to say nothing more specific than that they usually have a sepulchral significance, and betoken that regions now abandoned to the curlew and the buzzard once had a considerable population. Near Scorhill the Wallabrook is bestridden by a “clam” bridge, which, interpreted, means a bridge of a single slab of unhewn stone resting on the ground, as distinguished from a “clapper” bridge, consisting of one or more such slabs pillared on others, with no aid from mortar.
The North and the South Teign merge at Leigh Bridge, close by Holy Street and its picturesque mill, which has furnished a theme for the pencil of many an artist besides Creswick. Then the Teign flows under the old bridge at Chagford, a village overhung on one side by two rocky hills. The fine air of the place and its convenient situation for the exploration of Dartmoor bring to it many visitors in the summer; but it is certainly no place for a winter sojourn. The story goes—and racy of the soil it is—that if a Chagford man is asked in summer where he lives, he replies, as saucily as you please, “Chaggyford, and what d’ye think, then?” But if the question is put to him in winter, he sadly answers, “Chaggyford, good Lord!”
At Chagford the valley broadens out, but soon it again contracts, and, sensibly quickening its speed, Teign plunges headlong into what is perhaps the very finest of all the gorges in Devonshire. Near the entrance is a “logan” stone, a huge boulder of granite about a dozen feet long, so finely poised that it may with a very moderate exercise of force be made to rock, though it is less accommodating than when Polwhele, a century ago, succeeded in moving it with one hand. The finest view of the gorge is that to be got from Fingle Bridge, a couple of miles lower down, where, looking back, one sees how the stream has wound its way amid the interfolded hills, of which the steep slopes are clad with coppice of tender green. Here, on the left, is Prestonbury, and on the right the loftier Cranbrook, each crowned with its prehistoric “castle.” Of the narrow, ivy-mantled bridge, simple and massive, an illustration is given (p. [57]) showing the wedge-shaped piers which serve to break the fury of the torrent in time of spate.
Photo: G. Denney & Co., Teignmouth.
TEIGNMOUTH (p. [40]).
But we must hurry on past Clifford Mill and its bridge to Dunsford Bridge, another spot of singular beauty. On the right Heltor, on the left Blackstone, exalt their towering heads, both crowned with large “rock basins,” in which the rude fancy of our forefathers saw missiles that King Arthur and the Great Adversary hurled at each other athwart the intervening valley. So, passing more and more within the margin of cultivation, we come to Chudleigh, with its Rock, yielding a blue limestone, known to the builder as Chudleigh marble, and its lovely, richly-wooded glen, down which a little tributary dances gaily into the Teign. Not a great way beyond, our river is swollen by the waters of a more important affluent, the Bovey, which, from its source on Dartmoor, has followed a course not dissimilar from that of the Teign, lilting along through a rich and often spacious valley, past North Bovey, Manaton, Lustleigh, with its “Cleave,” and Bovey Tracy. At Newton Abbot, pleasantly placed a little to the south of the Teign, in a vale watered by the Lemon, we may have fine views of the valleys of the Teign and the Bovey by ascending the hills up which this neat little town has straggled. Its most memorable association is with the glorious Revolution, and there still stands in front of a Perpendicular tower, which is all that is left of the old Chapel of St. Leonard, the block of granite from which the Prince of Orange’s proclamation was read.