streams to generate electricity. Such schemes answer very well abroad,
in mountainous regions where there are large volumes of water at great
heights coming down precipitously. But on Dartmoor the heights are
relatively small, and the streams are far apart and never very large,
shrinking in summer into brooks, so that big reservoirs would be
required for maintaining the supply. I fancy the promoters of this
scheme were merely copying a thing that enterprising men had done
elsewhere, without considering whether such men would do the same thing
here. It seems absurd to spend big sums of money on these moorland
streams, when there are great tidal estuaries not many miles away. At
the mouths of the Exe and the Teign the estuaries run several miles
inland and have very narrow entrances: the tide comes in and out; and
twice a day the whole of this gigantic power goes to waste.
Dartmoor is often called a Forest and is marked as such on maps; but
there are hardly any trees there now, and can never have been many. It
was a Forest only in the legal sense; and that was long ago. Coke says
in his _Institutes_, iv. 73, page 313, ed. 1798--“If the King, being
seized of a Forest, grant the Forest to another in fee, the grantee
shall have no Forest.” When the King granted the Forest of Dartmoor to
the Earl of Cornwall, 10 October 1239, it ceased to be a Forest and
became a Chase. It was granted to the Black Prince as the Chase of
Dartmoor, 17 March 1336/7, when he was created Duke of Cornwall; and
this is the grant by which the Duchy holds it now.
I ought to pay the Duke of Cornwall five-and-twenty pennies every year;
but in these prosaic times my agent sends a postal-order to the Duchy
office instead, and usually sends 12_s._ 6_d._ to settle it for six
years at once. I have to pay these pennies as owner of Hurston for
certain privileges it has upon the moor; and the payment is called
Venvill. One finds “fines villarum” in an Inquiry held at Lydford on 19
June 1382, and “certos annuales redditus vocatos _fyn de vile_” in an
Inquiry held at Chagford on 23 September 1388: so Venvill must mean
Fines from Vills. Fine only means a payment that has been definitely
fixed, and does not mean a penalty here. Vill is the same word as
village, but with a wider meaning, and will take in anything from a
township down to what we call a farm.
At the Inquiry on 19 June 1382 the jurors said that these “fines
villarum” were payable from time immemorial to the King and his
progenitors by the tenants of divers vills near the forest of Dartmoor
for profits that they had within the forest. And that looks as if
Venvill were a survival from the times when Dartmoor was a royal forest,
and had not yet been granted to Dukes or Earls of Cornwall.
The Venvill tenements form a ring outside the commons that surround the
moor. According to the ministers’ accounts for Dartmoor in 1505-6 there
were forty-five such tenements, and the payments were 20_d._ for
Hurston, 5_d._ for Willandhead which adjoins it on one side, 4½_d._ for
Venn which adjoins it on the other, 8_d._ and 3_d._ for Jurston and
Higher Jurston which are next beyond Venn, 4_d._ for Littaford which is
next beyond Jurston, and so on. The total is 4_l._ 10_s._ 8_d._; and it
was 4_l._ 1_s._ 8_d._ in 1296-7, when these ministers’ accounts begin.
The payments were primarily for pasturing cattle on the moor, and in
1296-7 the 4_l._ 1_s._ 8_d._ is entered as “de finibus villarum pro
pastura averiorum habenda.” The right of pasture was restricted to as
many cattle as could be wintered on the Venvill tenements, but there
were some other rights as well. At the Inquiry on 19 June 1382 the jury
said that the Venvill men could help themselves to “carbones, turbarias,
fugeras, jampnos et lapides,” and at an Inquiry at Okehampton on 16
August 1608 the jury made it “turves, vagges, heath, stone, cole,” and
“all thinges that maye doe them good, savinge vert and venson,” vert
being the greenwood that gave covert to the deer. I take ‘jampnos’ and
‘fugeras’ to be gorse and bracken, not heath and vagges--at any rate
‘vagges’ now means turf--and I presume that ‘carbones’ or ‘cole’ means
peat, as the moor does not produce what we call coal.
The peat is mostly in the middle of the moor, too far out for many of
the Venvill men to fetch it, and they use turf instead. This is cut
about three inches thick, left upside down to dry, and then brought in;
and it makes a very good fuel. Peat has naphtha in it; and for some
years the Dartmoor peat was tried for this. My father notes in his
diary, 5 September 1846--“Saw over the prisons at Princes Town, and the
preparations for the Naphtha Manufactory there.” The prisons were built
for prisoners-of-war, and were vacant from 1816 until 1850, when they
were fitted up for convicts.
In very dry summers the peat turns into dust some feet in depth. Writing
to my father on 4 September 1857, my grandfather says--“This is the
hottest summer, I think, since 1826, when Mr Smethurst and I went
exploring Dartmoor. We went two years following, and I think it was 1825
and 1826, the latter the hottest by far, for we could not get our horses
over the same ground, the peat being so pulverized by the extreme heat;
and we had hard work in digging out our horses.”
I used to tramp about the moor in former years, generally going out from
here, but sometimes using Hurston as a base. And two or three times
every summer I found people straying about, miles away from where they
meant to go. They were lodging in the villages or farms, had gone out
for a ramble on the moor, and were completely lost.
In the spring of 1915 I lost myself out there. I had driven as far as
Natsworthy gate, and then sent the trap down the valley to wait for me
at Widdicombe, saying that I would walk along the ridge of Hameldon,
which flanks the valley on the west. I walked over to Grimspound and up
to Hameldon cross--about 1750 feet above the sea--and then a mist came
down and shut out everything over fifty yards away. There is no track
there, and I could not see the landmarks by which I knew the way, nor
could I make out whereabouts the sun was, as the mist diffused the
light. I had not brought a compass with me, but I went steadily on,
imagining that I was going straight ahead, until I was confronted by a
mass of rocks that I recognized as Hookney Tor. I had been trending to
the left all the while and had made a semicircle of two miles--I could
not have reached that point in any other way except by going down into a
hollow and coming up again, and I had kept upon the top. Having reached
a point I knew, I went no further in the mist, but dropped down into the
valley below, where I knew there was a road. But this was the valley on
the other side of Hameldon, and I was now six miles from Widdicombe and
from my lunch.
Nobody need be lost out there for any length of time. As soon as you see
running water, you follow that down; and sooner or later it will bring
you to a cottage or a mill, and so into a road that leads to somewhere,
though it may not lead to where you want to go. But if you stay on the
high ground and go on trying to find the place you want, you may be out
all night.
In the summer of 1917 I found an old lady who had been missing for more
than twenty-four hours. There were parties out in search of her, but
they had all kept nearer home, not thinking that she would have wandered
off so far. I ought really to have gone off on the search myself, but I
had other things to do, and that was how I happened to see her.
Some summers ago two ladies took lodgings at a farm about a mile from
here, and they went out after tea on the afternoon of their arrival.
They did not come in, and people went out in search of them; and at dawn
they were found sitting on the hillside, with their umbrellas up, and
five-and-twenty bullocks standing round them in a circle, contemplating
them.
Something of the same sort happened to two ladies whom I know, while
they were staying in a Riviera town. On the morning of Ash Wednesday
they were going to an early service at the English church, and on their
way they met a party of revellers returning from some Carnival
festivity, attired in costumes and masks. There must have been something
about these ladies that filled the revellers with delight: it may have
been a certain primness, or possibly it was their prayer-books. Whatever
it was, the revellers just glanced at one another, made a circle and
joined hands, danced round them in dead silence for a minute or two, and
then went upon their way.
Out on Dartmoor the dancers should be pixies, and their footsteps ought
to make a circle of fresh verdure on the turf. But a botanist assures me
that pixies dance round _Agaricus Oreadis_, if they dance round anything
at all. This is the plant that makes these circles, the fresh growth
being further and further from the parent plant in each succeeding year.
There are other circles on the moor--great granite circles like
Stonehenge, but not so big as that--and people say that these dance
round, and they can tell you why. Thus, years ago nine maidens went to
Belstone on the Beltane day and danced round naked in the noontide sun.
(Beltane is May Day now, and we are more demure.) And the Nine Maidens
were changed into nine granite pillars standing in a circle there. Every
day at noon they try to dance, and some days they go dancing round.
I never saw a circle dance, but I once saw the avenue on Hurston Ridge
do something very like it. It was a broiling day after a spell of wet,
and a vapour went up from the peaty soil. In the shimmer of this I saw
the rows of granite pillars all swaying and bobbing about like people in
a country dance, and was quite prepared to see a couple make their bow
and go off down the middle and up again.
These avenues and circles have lately been the victims of a theory that
used to be applied to churches. Old churches in England usually face
eastward, but seldom face due east; and the theory is that they face the
point at which the sun rose on the day when the foundation-stone was
laid, and this would be the feast-day of the patron-saint.
The avenue on Downtor is said to point to sunrise on April 29, and so
also a line drawn through the centre of the circle at Merivale to a
menhir about 300 yards away; and other lines are said to point to
sunrise on other days about that time of year--Lockyer, _Stonehenge_,
page 481, ed. 1909--the theory being that they pointed to the sunrise on
the Beltane day--page 309. I presume the Beltane fires were what we call
‘swayling’ now, that is, burning off old gorse and heather to make way
for fresh shoots that will be soft enough for beasts to eat. This
swayling is done at any odd times now, and with insufficient care, fires
often getting beyond control and burning down plantations of young
trees; but in my early days it was done on Maundy Thursday with as much
regularity as potato planting on Good Friday. It perhaps was done in
former times on some fixed day about May 1, and that was Beltane day;
but I fail to see why Beltane day should be picked out for setting up an
avenue or circle, or why a circle should be used for marking a straight
line.
Many of the Dartmoor avenues can never have faced the sunrise, as they
point too much to northward or to southward of the east. And then the
theory says--One side of the larger avenue at Merivale faced the rising
of the Pleiades in 1400 B.C. and the other side faced their rising in
1580 B.C., the smaller avenue faced the rising of Arcturus in 1860 B.C.,
the avenue on Shovel Down faced the rising of Alpha Centauri in 2900
B.C. and the avenue at Challacombe faced its rising in 3600 B.C., and so
on with many more--pages 483, 484. The church theory has an intelligible
base--the saint’s-day sunrise--though the base is insecure; and the
Beltane sunrise is intelligible also, though still more insecure: but
this stellar theory has no base at all. You pick out any star you please
and get a date accordingly.
Looking out on Dartmoor with its rain and mist and fog, it seems
improbable that anyone would trouble much about the stars out there, or
take them as a guide in setting up an avenue. The ancient Egyptians may
have done such things in their pellucid air, and theorists say they did;
but that, I think, is a mistake. The rising of Sirius is recorded in
inscriptions of Rameses II and VI and X--engraved in Lepsius,
_Denkmaeler aus Aegypten_, part 3, plates 170 and 227 to 228 bis--and
these inscriptions cover a length of time in which the rising would have
varied a good deal, yet the variation is ignored. The entries cannot
have been based on observations--otherwise the variation would
appear--and this Rising of Sirius must have been as great a fiction as
our ecclesiastical Full Moon that gives the date for Easter.
There is a curious circle at Dûris in the Lebanon valley, and I went to
see it, 31 March 1882. It has eight upright stones, about twelve feet
high and six apart, with others laid on top of them like lintels, as in
the outer circle at Stonehenge. So far as a circle can be said to point
to anything, this circle points to Mecca, a Roman sarcophagus being set
up on end in one of the intervals between the uprights, and thus forming
a niche for the mihrâb. The uprights are drums of columns and the
lintels are squared stones, evidently taken from a temple or some other
building of Greek or Roman times. So the circle is comparatively modern,
yet its builders were aiming at the same effect as the builders of
Stonehenge.
Those rough stones on Dartmoor show no signs of high antiquity. The
avenues might be tracks for driving sheep or cattle, and the circles
might be pounds for penning them in; and some may really be no more than
that. But the circles often have a grave in the centre, and the avenues
sometimes have one at the end; and the graves have urns and implements
and weapons as ancient as the Bronze Age or the last half of the Stone
Age.
People are much too fond of giving those Ages definite dates, say 1500
or 1000 B.C. for the change from Stone to Bronze and 500 B.C. for the
change from Bronze to Iron. In reality these Ages must have overlapped,
surviving in some regions long after they died out in others; and there
may have been people out on Dartmoor using bronze and flint long after
Exeter was occupied by Romans.--A friend has given me a fancy portrait
of some progenitor of mine out there denouncing their new-fangled notion
of living in houses, instead of living in hut-circles as everybody
should. I think it was inspired by something that I said about the
comfort of having good thick walls and thatch, instead of merely brick
and slate, when the weather is either hot or cold.
These hut-circles differ from those other circles in being formed of
granite slabs set up on edge and touching one another, whereas those
others are formed of pillars standing some way apart and enclosing much
more ground. They probably had roofs of poles and thatch, looking like
bell tents, but the roofing has all gone. They are common enough in all
the Dartmoor district--there must be some thousands of them there--and
usually they are in little groups of three or four. Some of the larger
groups have ramparts round them; and these are known as Pounds. The
grandest is Grimspound, with an area of about four acres containing
five-and-twenty huts; but it has rather lost its dignity in these last
fifty years, as a good road was carried down the valley in 1874 and
comes within three hundred yards of it.
These ancient dwellings are usually on the sheltered slopes of hills;
and on the summits of the hills there are great mounds that mark the
graves of kings or chiefs. Sometimes, looking at the view and seeing
those mounds against the sky, I get the same uncanny feeling that comes
over me at places in Egypt and Etruria--the whole living country is
dominated by the dead. There are six of these graves within about two
miles on the range of hills behind Grimspound; and when one of them was
opened in 1872, the chieftain’s dagger was found--a blade of bronze and
a pommel of amber with a pattern worked in gold.
On a grave in Moreton churchyard there is a little granite figure of a
child with wings. A man from Cornwall was working in a quarry near
there; and when his child died, he got a block of granite from the
quarry and carved an angel out of that. It is a crude piece of work
without any of the mechanical excellence of other monuments close by,
yet it impresses me much more. I fancy that the genius of the place is
present there and gazing up towards those solemn hills where the Giant’s
Grave stands out against the sky.
In this district there are many granite crosses still remaining, though
many have been broken up. Here in Lustleigh parish there is one at South
Harton that has been cleft down the middle to make a pair of gate-posts,
another one at Sanduck that was built into the porch of the house and
came to light again when that was taken down, the top of another in a
field near Higher Coombe, and the base for another by the road-side near
the railway-station. The base has the coat-of-arms of bishop Grandisson
of Exeter, 1327 to 1369. This cross, therefore, was ecclesiastical; but
some were not. There was an inquiry at Brent on 25 August 1557 as to the
boundary between Dartmoor and Brentmoor, and the commissioners certified
that they had marked the boundary by setting up stone crosses. They
probably thought that people were less likely to tamper with a cross
than with a common boundary-stone.
Under cover of the War a great big painted crucifix has been set up in a
churchyard about three miles from here. The early Christians never
portrayed the crucifixion, and their successors idealized it--a majestic
figure in regal robes with outstretched arms, to which the cross just
formed a background. Then came the miserable type that we all know--a
realistic study of a condemned man suffering the last penalty of what
was then the law. There is no semblance of divinity about it; and in the
countries where one sees it most, the Trinity that they invoke is
Gesu-Maria-Giuseppe or Jésus-Marie-Joseph. The whole thing has become
mundane.
The old granite crosses always have short arms, and may belong to a
primæval type that had nothing to do with crucifixion. According to
Cæsar (_De bello Gallico_, vi. 18) the Druids said that Dis was the
ancestral deity of all the Celtic race; and figures of this deity have
come to light. As his attribute he holds up a big sledgehammer; and I
suspect his hammer was the prototype of all these crosses--the ancient
symbol was retained, but with an altered meaning.
When these northern nations were converted, the new religion was grafted
on the old; and the grafting was not always neatly done. The Anglo-Saxon
kings all claimed descent from Woden, and he was once a god; but when
they took up Christianity, they had to fit him in. The Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle (855) knows better than the Pentateuch what happened in Noah’s
Ark. That speaks only of Shem and Ham and Japheth; but Noah’s wife had
another baby while she was on board--“se wæs geboren in thære earche
Noe”--and this was Woden’s ancestor.
That seems incongruous enough, but it is nothing to the incongruity of
an Anglo-Saxon coin with its inscription all in Arabic except two lines
of Roman letters, “Offa the King,” which come in upside down between
three lines of Arabic, “Mohammed the Prophet of God.” It is a gold coin,
a mancus, of the same weight as an Arabic dinar; and it is dated in year
157 of the Hegira, or 773 A.D. It was found in Rome, and must be one of
those gold mancuses that King Offa undertook to pay Pope Hadrian for
Peter’s Pence.
The southernmost part of Italy was known as Bruttium in Latin, but
Brettia in Greek, and was said to take its name from Brettos (a son of
Hercules) who came over with the first Greek colonists. And this, I
suspect, is the only basis for the story that Britain took its name from
an imaginary Brutus who brought a colony here. I suspect that Geoffrey
of Monmouth got the Brettos story at second hand through Stephanos, who
quotes it from Antiochos of Syracuse, say 423 B.C. And our Geoffrey
either got it wrong, or altered it to suit his theme, and thus created
Brute the Trojan.
The story of Brute the Trojan is not wilder than the story of Æneas, and
the motive is the same--to connect the Britons (like the Romans) with
the Homeric heroes and thus with the Olympian gods. (Brute was a
great-grandson of Æneas, so Venus was his great-great-grandmother.) I
cannot see why the story makes the Trojans land at Totnes, fifteen miles
from here, rather than in any other part of Britain. But at Totnes they
show you the very stone on which Brute stepped ashore, just as they show
you the stone at Brixham on which Dutch William stepped ashore, and the
stone at Newton from which he was proclaimed as King.
Nobody takes Brute the Trojan very seriously now; but I cannot
understand the people who scoff at Trojans coming to Britain, and then
talk solemnly of Phœnicians coming here. In books and pamphlets and
essays and articles and by word of mouth, in Devon and in Cornwall and
the Scilly isles, one hears everlastingly of these Phœnicians.
All this talk of the Phœnicians is founded on a blunder. Strabo devotes
book iii of his _Geographica_ to what we now call Spain and Portugal. In
iii. 5. 11 he says that the Cassiterides islands were off the coast of
Spain and Portugal, and that the tin trade with these islands was
formerly in the hands of the Phœnicians. In iii. 2. 9 he says that tin
was found in Spain and Portugal and in the Cassiterides, and adds
parenthetically “and it is brought also from Britain to Marseilles.”
Diodoros is more explicit, v. 22, 38, saying that the British tin came
from the western part of England, and went to Marseilles overland
through France, a journey of thirty days with horses. I suppose people
have forgotten Diodoros, and failed to see that Strabo is using a
parenthesis; and have then mixed up the whole of what he says in iii. 2.
9 with what he says about the Phœnicians in iii. 5. 11. There is no
suggestion in any ancient author that the Phœnicians ever had anything
to do with this trade in British tin.
As for the Cassiterides, they must be the Burlings. These are the only
noticeable islands on the outer coast of Spain and Portugal; and ancient
authors say the Cassiterides were on that coast. Strabo and Diodoros,
Mela and Pliny, Ptolemy, Dionysios and Avienus, all agree in putting
them there, though they give them various positions from Cape Finisterre
and Ferrol down to Cape St Vincent, and call them Hesperides or
Œstrymnides as well as Cassiterides.
In the Scillies it is an article of faith that those islands are the
Cassiterides, and this heresy of mine aroused the wrath of good
Scillonians. (They never say Scilly Islanders themselves: it is too
ambiguous.) Those islands seemed very remote, when I visited them first,
in the autumn of 1886. The cable was broken, and the mail-boat did not
waste her coal on making the passage in an equinoctial gale. But people
told me I could get a pilot-cutter to take me off in any weather for £5.
If it failed to make Penzance, it was sure of making Cork or Brest.
My going to the Scillies was indirectly the cause of Walter Besant’s
going there and writing his novel of _Armorel of Lyonesse_. I was often
talking of the islands after I came back, and he went in the spring of
1889. The novel pleased the islanders, and when I went there next (1896)
there seemed to be an _Armorel_ in every house. It was a contrast to
Tarascon and Alphonse Daudet’s book. I never saw a _Tartarin_ anywhere
there.
Being at Tarascon, I inquired for the Tarasque--the dragon that was led
captive by Saint Martha--and I found it locked up in a stable, 18 March
1891. It is not allowed out in processions now, as it has broken too
many people’s bones by the waggings of its tail. Getting inside it, I
found a tiller that worked the tail as if it were a rudder, and I made
it wag.
The dragon at Tarascon is not unlike the dragon in one of Retzsch’s
illustrations to Schiller’s _Kampf mit dem Drachen_, where the knight
uses a dummy to accustom his horse and hounds to the look of a dragon in
real life. He does this in France, and then goes back to Rhodes and
kills the dragon there. The story is told of Dieudonné de Gozon; and he
must have seen the dummy at Tarascon, as he was at Avignon from 1324 to
1332. But in one version the knight dressed up a bull to personate the
dragon. In a version current at Rhodes it is a dervish, not a knight. He
loaded forty donkeys with eighty sacks of lime, and drove them past the
dragon’s den. The dragon swallowed them, lime and all, and then went
down to drink.