Local Lore
BOTH these authors have travelled much in their respective fields and delved deeply in local lore, but neither of them has attempted a guide book telling the reader how to get there, what to see and how to see it.
Mr. Hawkins had a boundless store of legend, myth and history upon which to draw and he has done so liberally. Glastonbury with its holy thorn and its traditions of Joseph of Arimathea, of St. Patrick and St. David, of Arthur and Guinevere and the Holy Grail, King Alfred and Athelney, Sedgemoor, Monmouth and Jeffreys provides ample material and the author leaves it to the reader to draw the line between fact and fiction. Controversy and doubt he agrees are inevitable. Thanks to the preservative powers of peat and the skill of modern archmologists in excavating the lake villages of Godney and Meare, he says, we know a lot about the people who inhabited the district three hundred years before the birth of Christ and very little about the people who lived three hundred years after his birth.
Glastonbury, the legendary Isle of Avalon, is given good measure, but not to the extent of crowding out other places and features. The rivers and the rhines, willow and peat, farming, cider and sheep, the Sedgemoyr country and the villages and coast all have their place.
Mr. St. Leger Gordon writes from an intimate knowledge of Dartmoor and its people. Here and there he gives a hint of a nostalgic longing for the past but he is under no illusion that every- thing was for the best in the good old days: From a less-known work of Mrs. Beeton, her Penny Cookery Book, for people of limited means, he quotes a ' weekly bill of fare for a man with a wife and four children earning 10s. per week, and whose expenditure for breakfasts, dinners and suppers may amount to 5s. and 10d. weekly.' Commenting on the disappearing West-country brogue—the dialect that prides itself on being the speech of King Alfred, he says: 'It is significant that although the northern accent may be heard from Cabinet Ministers, or even in the House of Lords, Parliament has yet to be addressed in tones peculiar to Devonshire.'
In creating his picture of Dartmoor people the author takes details from farther afield and much of the book is in fact social history applicable with minor variations to Kent or Yorkshire. This titeatment undoubtedly widens the appeal of the book Which will be read with interest by many who may never have heard of Sticklepath, Belstone or other Dartmoor villages.
TOM STEPHENSON
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