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  [Illustration: LYDFORD GORGE
                 (_Page 24_)]



DARTMOOR

Described by Arthur L. Salmon


Pictured by E. W. Haslehust


BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED
LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY


_Blackie & Son's "Beautiful" Series_


Beautiful England

    Bath and Wells
    Bournemouth and Christchurch
    Cambridge
    Canterbury
    Chester and the Dee
    The Cornish Riviera
    Dartmoor
    Dickens-Land
    The Dukeries
    The English Lakes
    Exeter
    Folkestone and Dover
    Hampton Court
    Hastings and Neighbourhood
    Hereford and the Wye
    The Isle of Wight
    The New Forest
    Norwich and the Broads
    Oxford
    The Peak District
    Ripon and Harrogate
    Scarborough
    Shakespeare-Land
    Swanage and Neighbourhood
    The Thames
    Warwick and Leamington
    The Heart of Wessex
    Winchester
    Windsor Castle
    York


Beautiful Scotland

    Edinburgh
    The Shores of Fife
    Loch Lomond, Loch Katrine, and the Trossachs
    The Scott Country


Beautiful Ireland

    Connaught
    Leinster
    Munster
    Ulster


Beautiful Switzerland

    Chamonix
    Lausanne and its Environs
    Lucerne
    Villars and Champery


_Printed and bound in Great Britain_




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                Facing Page

Lydford Gorge                                 _Frontispiece_

Wistman's Wood                                            8

Two Bridges                                              16

Ockery Bridge, near Princetown                           20

Clapper Bridge, Postbridge                               24

Brent Tor                                                29

Tavy Cleave                                              33

Widecombe on the Moor                                    40

Dartmeet                                                 48

A Moorland Track, the Devil's Bridge                     53

Stone Avenue, near Merrivale                             56

A Dartmoor Stream                                        60




  [Illustration: DARTMOOR]


Dartmoor is a fine-sounding name, and no one would wish to displace
it; yet in one sense it is a misleading and inappropriate designation
of the great central Devonshire moorland. The moorland is not
distinctively the moor of the Dart, any more than of the Teign, the
Tavy, or the Ockment; it is the cradle-land of rivers, and there is no
obvious reason why the Dart should have assumed such supremacy. But
there is historic fitness about the title. It is probable that the
Saxons first became acquainted with Dartmoor from the fertile district
known as the South Hams, watered by the beautiful reaches of the Dart
from Totnes to its mouth. The wide intermediate waste that lay between
the North and the South Hams was a region of mystery to them, and they
associated it with this swift, sparkling stream that issued from its
cleaves and bogs.

Whatever its actual population may have been, imagination would people
it with spirits and demons; while it needed no imagination to supply
the storms, the blinding fogs and rains, the baying wolves that
haunted its recesses. They were content to retain its old Celtic name
for the river, and they applied this name to the moor as well; it
became the moor of the Dart. The name Dart, supposed to be akin to
Darent and Derwent, is almost certainly a derivative from the Celtic
_dwr_, water. The moorland itself is a mass of granite upheaved in
pre-glacial days, weathered by countless centuries into undulating
surfaces, pierced by jagged tors, and interspersed with large patches
of bog and peat-mire. This is the biggest granitic area in England,
the granite extending for about 225 square miles; though that which is
known as Dartmoor Forest (never a forest in our accepted meaning of
the word) is considerably smaller, having been much encroached upon by
tillage and enclosure. There is a further protrusion of granite on the
Bodmin Moors, and again as far west as Scilly; while Lundy, in the
Bristol Channel, belongs almost entirely to the same formation.
Beneath the mire and peat, which are the decaying deposits of
vegetable matter, lies a stratum of china-clay, which is worked
productively to the south of the moors, and still more largely in
Cornwall. The average height of the moorland is about 1500 feet,
rising in places to a little over 2000. This elevation is exceeded in
Wales, in the Lake District, and in Scotland; and nowhere does
Dartmoor appear actually mountainous, one reason being that the
plateau from which we view its chief eminences is always well over
1000 feet above sea level, and thus a great portion of the height is
not realized. But we realize it to some extent when we notice the
speed of the moorland rivers; they do not linger and dally like
Midland streams, they run and dash and make a perpetual music of their
motion. In winter they are strong enough to make playthings of the
rough lichened boulders that confront their course; and in the hottest
summers they never run dry--the mother-breast of Dartmoor has always
ample nourishment. Though there is a lessening in the body of the
rivers, and perhaps a surface-drought of the bogs, the moors are never
really parched; drovers from the Eastern counties sometimes bring
their flocks hither in a summer of great heat, to feed on Dartmoor
turfs when their own home-pastures would be arid. Yet the central moor
is more like a desolate waste than a pasture. Its rugged turfy surface
is scattered with small and large fragments of granite, sometimes
"clitters" of weather-worn boulders, sometimes masses that look as
though prehistoric giants had been playing at bowls. Often strange and
fantastic in shape, as twilight steals on, or the weird gloom of
moorland fog, they seem to become animated; they are pixies, brownies,
the ghosts of old vanished peoples; wherever we gaze they start before
us; prying figures seem to be hiding behind them, ill-wishing us, or
eager to lure us into desolate solitudes. The wind sighs with solitary
tone through the rough grasses and tussocks; at this height its
evening breath is chill even in summer. Some of the stones are
shattered monuments of dead men; some perhaps had a religious
significance that the world has forgotten. The loneliness of the moor
is often a charm, but it can become oppressive and terrible if our
mood is not buoyant. In places like these the strongest mind might
yield to superstition. We seem to be in a region of the primal world,
where ploughshare has never passed nor kindly grain sprung forth for
the nourishment of man.

  [Illustration: WISTMAN'S WOOD
                 (_Page 13_)]

But we do not come to Dartmoor for traces of the earliest man in
England; for these we must go to Kent's Cavern, Torquay, or to
Brixham, not to the moors. Tokens of habitation on Dartmoor only begin
with Neolithic times, and are by no means continuous. At one time
there must have been a thick population; but Celt and Saxon have left
little trace on the moors, and the Romans none at all. Though the
Celts may have conquered the Iberian tribes here, they probably
neither exterminated nor entirely dispossessed them. They were content
with the fringes of the wilderness, leaving the rest to the mists, the
wolves, and the lingering older race. It was man of the New Stone Age
who first peopled this upland, leaving remains of his hut-dwellings,
his pounds, dolmens, and menhirs, his kistvaens and his cooking-holes.
Numerous as the remains are still, they were once far more so; they
have been broken up or carted away for road-mending, for gateposts and
threshold stones, for building, for "new-take" or other walls, and for
any other purpose to which granite can be applied. This central
highland may have become a refuge of the later Stone-men against
invaders of better equipment: all the traces of camps are on the
borders, defensive against an external enemy; within is no sign of
anything but peaceful pastoral occupation and tin-streaming.

Place names, of field or of farm, enable us to infer the former
existence of primitive relics: wherever there is a Shilstone (shelf
stone) or a Bradstone (broad stone) we may be sure there was once a
dolmen or cromlech; wherever there is a Langstone or Longstone we
guess at a menhir or standing-stone. These early inhabitants of the
moor had advanced far from the condition of the rude cave folk; they
built themselves low circular huts, generally clustered within pounds
(enclosures whose chief purpose here seems to have been the protection
of cattle; some of the pounds were clearly for cattle alone). At
Grimspound, near Hookner Tor, are traces of twenty-four huts, enclosed
in a double wall 1500 feet in circumference. The huts had low
doorways, and usually platforms for domestic purposes, with
hearthstones and cooking-holes. The food to be cooked was placed in
the hole, sometimes in a coarse clay pot, sometimes without, together
with red-hot stones from the hearth. Near Postbridge as many as
fifteen pounds can be traced, while at Whit Tor are other numerous
traces. Those at Grimspound evidently belong to the Bronze Age; like
different periods of architecture, the Stone and Metal Ages very much
overlapped.

At first the burial of these people was in dolmens, like the fine
specimen at Drewsteignton; later, cremation became the fashion, and
the smaller kistvaen, or stone chest, was used. The kistvaen was
covered by cairns or heaps of stones, probably placed there in tribute
to the dead: there are many relics of such on the moors, as in
Cornwall, but they have usually been scattered or mutilated, and the
contents rifled by seekers after buried treasure. The stone-circles on
the moor are, of course, entirely dwarfed by Stonehenge, but when the
problem of the greater is solved we shall know that of the lesser; at
present we can only conjecture. The Scaur Hill circle on Gidleigh
Common is a good specimen, being about ninety-two feet in diameter;
near it are several stone-rows or alignments. Dartmoor is famous for
these lines of standing-stones, which are generally connected with
places of burial; the longest, on Staldon, starting from a circle,
runs for over two miles. These, together with the single stones or
menhirs, were probably intended as memorials of persons or events, and
may also have been used as places of gathering; but their religious
significance, if any, can have been little more than a primitive
ancestor