Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/247

Rh " is to go astray and become so bewildered as not to be able to find the way at all. How entirely one may go wrong even with the best appliances, the following experience will show.

One morning, my friend Mr. R. Burnard, with one of the officers of the Ordnance Survey, another gentleman and myself, started from the Duchy Hotel, Princetown, with the object of visiting an unregistered stone row on Conies Down Tor, which at our request the Survey was about to include in their map. We started at 9.30 a.m., of course provided with compasses and surveying apparatus. There was a bit of fog as we left the hotel door, but as we heard the larks singing aloft we expected it to clear. Mr. Burnard and the officer got ahead of us, and disappeared in the mist before we had gone a hundred yards—and we saw them no more that day.

Beyond the Prisons there is a short cut across the enclosures made by the convicts, into the main Tavistock and Moreton road; we took that, and on reaching the road struck by Fitz's Well due north, or nearly so, for Black Dunghill (Blackadun-hill). Then I knew that by going due north we must strike the Lych Way, the track by which corpses were formerly carried from the centre and east side of the moor for interment at Lydford. This Lych Way is fairly well marked.

The mist became thicker; we walked on, hoping on reaching Conies Down Tor to find our friends there. But after a bit I got completely lost; we came on a dip or pan in which were sheep, but no