AUTUMN ON DARTMOOR.
,,THE plain truth is that it needs a cheerful temper and a stout heart to visit Widdecombe," writes Mr. Arthur Norway in " Highways and Byways in Devon and Cornwall," and the pedestrian of to-day wonders whether the roads have lately been mended. In these days cheerful tempers and stout hearts must be commoner than they used to be, for Widdecombe receives visitors without counting through the summer, and even in October spreads an inn table with beef and apple-pie and Devonshire cream for the casual wayfarer. Of all Dartmoor villages, Widdecombe perhaps attracts the largest numbers of pilgrims. It has its own traditions and its own Devonshire song. It was Widdecombe Church which the devil selected one Sunday in 1638, doubtless because of the great height of its stone tower, as a convenient post to which to tie up his horse; he found a boy asleep when the sermon was going on, and flew through the roof with him, leaving behind him the most devastating traces of thunder, lightning and brimstone. And it was to Widdecombe Fair, of course, that Tom Pearse's grey mare set out with Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer and the rest on her last most melancholy journey. It was the road to Widdecombe which broke the grey mare's heart, Mr. Norway thinks; but it really is not a very bad road. It runs from Merripit through open moorland till it dips down between high hedges in which you can cut a good ground ash, and out the other side it climbs up towards Rippon Tor and the logan stone under it by a track which is certainly steep anda little stony, but which is quite easy walking. Possibly the majority of Widdecombe's visitors do not walk ; possibly they have rolled in some of the loose stones. In any case there are many of them, and the inn suggests a cheerful outlook on life.
Dartmoor, no doubt, to-day is very much better known throughout its length and breadth than it was fifteen years or so ago, before Englishmen developed the habit of travelling about their own country. Or perhaps, rather, the roads and villages of Dartmoor are much better known ; the moor itself must always deny full knowledge. Dartmoor is crossed by one road which runs pretty straight south-west from Moreton Hampstead to Yelverton, and by another which winds north- east from .Ashburton and turns due east towards Taviatock. The two roads intersect at Two Bridges, and at Two Bridges there is an hotel which can send its guests in an hour's walking into the very heart of the moor. Within a radius of two or three miles you may pass from problem to problem of the past of Dartmoor; problems of history that never can be written; problems of written history too savage almost for belief. Here, where the rough little moor ponies pull at the short grasses among the heather, you may find yourself standing over a ring of tumbled granite, and may puzzle for the twentieth time over the thwarting riddle of the stones which make up the "hut circles " and " pounds" and " avenues " scattered over the moor. There may be a "pound" or two which are nothing more than shepherds' enclosures a few centuries old, perhaps ; but the but circles and avenues are an abiding problem. A stretch of turf running level between parallel lines of pointed stones for some two hundred and fifty yards, with here another line of stones jutting from the avenue at a sharp angle, and here a circle of shapen stones set in the avenue opposite another circle—was it a temple, or a memorial, or a burial-place ? Only some deep instinct of worship, surely, could have dragged those huge masses of granite into position and planted them so deep in the hillside that after uncounted centuries we can puzzle over the age of them and their builders' lost patterns. The shape of the stones in these avenues suggests a question. They are most of them sharp and small at the top and thick at the base, and are set close together—so close indeed that you wonder whether they may not be touching at the foot under the peat. These stones have doubtless been measured over and over again ; but has any comparison been made between recent measurements and any measurements which may have been taken years ago P If not, there would seem to be an opportunity for making a calculation as to possibilities of age and size. For the Dartmoor granite is not a hard stone, and wears in the weather— a point which has been rather curiously illustrated in recent Dartmoor history. A hundred years or so ago a local enthusiast carved a number of herdic inscriptions of his own devising upon the face of certain chosen rocks in his neighbourhood, and to-day none of his inscriptions are decipherable. If a single century has defaced so much that was carved deep in the solid rock, bow much has been worn away from the menhirs and stone avenues of Dartmoor during the silent (eons since they were first set in their places ? A comparison of measurements made at regular intervals might help to some kind of guess as to whether for later ages than ours the lessening stones may not have vanished altogether.
But there are other riddles of the moor besides its stones. In the very centre of the moor, Wistman's Wood still asks its unanswered questions of age and origin. Wistman's Wood is a strip of oak trees which have been planted, or seeded themselves, along the east side of the upper valley of the West Dart. It is a wood of Calibans; a wood with a floor of tumbled rock and trees growing in lairs in the rock. It does not need an imaginative mind, in Wistman's Wood, to feel the same entrance into a presence as belongs to the spell set about the circles and stone rows on the hillside near. These gnarled and writhen boles, with their roots driven deep in crevasses and interstices of lichened rock, suck surely a different sap from that of the upstanding, broad- shaded oaks of open forest lands. You may clamber down among them, balancing on sharp slides of granite and sinking deep into piled fibre of grass and moss, and in that silent shadow, with those crumpled boughs above and below, you get somewhere a fresh sense of the abiding cruelty which broods over the wide beauty of the moor. For that is the separate spell over Dartmoor which sets it apart from the slopes of heather and rock of other forests and other moors. It is the hint of cruelty in its forgotten ages, in its known history, in its present memories, in its heights, topped each with its named tor, shaped like animals on the surround-
ing hills, Hound Tor, and For Tor, and Vixen Tor; the cruelty which belongs to the old laws of the Dart- moor mines, and the legend of the river, and the presence of the prison set in the centre of the moor to-day. It was on Crockern Tor, south of Wistman's Wood, that the old miners held their stannary courts and framed the savage sentences of Lydford law, which hanged first and tried afterwards, and dosed the throats of those who broke it with the molten metal they had mined. To-day, on the heights by Princetown, a couple of miles away, you may catch sight of grim, great-coated figures, with their rifles silhouetted against the sky, watching over the men working below them. And below in the valley, wits the grey wagtails balancing and bowing on its stones, and the fern and bog violets green about its tiny tributaries, runs the Dart with its wicked legend of sudden floods and deeps and drownings, a heart every year to rhyme with its name.
October is a silent month in moorland country, and you would not expect on the bleak uplands above the river to hear the same opening notes of the autumn song of birds which belong to the green trees of its woods and valleys. But it is impossible to walk far on the moor without being struck by the lifelessness of the place compared with a Scottish moor- land with its plover and curlew and its challenging grouse. Here and there a stray home-bred snipe may dart out of the rushes—the " foreigners" do not come in till late in the month— and you may chance on a flock of golden plover, wheeling and flashing in the sun, or running almost invisible among the grey stones of some stretch of strewn but circles Over all the hills round, too, the moorland ponies and the red cattle stray, browsing on the grass and heather; but there is a certain sense of loneliness in so wide a sweep of heather with- out the birds which belong to the northern moors. The red grouse, of course, has long vanished from Dartmoor; but the black grouse, which used to be common, has come to a vanishing point only in our own time. It has been merci- lessly shot down year after year, until this season the authorities of the Duchy of Cornwall have actually tried the experiment of introducing blackgame from abroad, and, in order to give the imported birds a chance of survival, have ceased to issue forest licences to shoot. Probably nothing short of complete protection during the year would give black. game a fresh chance of existence on Dartmoor, and even that protection would have to be prolonged through several successive seasons. But it is quite possible, too, that more will be needed than the mere prohibition of shooting. One of the reasons why blackgame find conditions of life so difficult on Dartmoor lies in the number of sheep, cattle and ponies which trample almost every inch of the ground in the breeding season. But to prohibit the pasturing of cattle in the breeding season to an extent sufficient to safeguard a problematical number of blackgame nests in unknown situa- tions would, of course, be impossible.
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