Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/365

Rh At Morwell is the hunting-lodge of Abbot Courtenay, cousin of Bishop Grandisson, and appointed by him to Tavistock Abbey. It was a very unsatisfactory appointment. He alienated the property of the abbey, and allowed its buildings and discipline to fall into decay, and got the monastery into a debt equivalent to twenty thousand pounds of our money. All he cared for was sport, like the jolly monk in Chaucer's Prologue.

The quadrangle, which was in a singularly untouched condition, with hall and butteries and kitchens, was somewhat wantonly mutilated some fifty years ago and turned into farmhouse and cottages.

From Tavistock Lydford can be visited with ease. This was a very strong place at one time, a sort of inland cliff-castle, situated in a fork between ravines, with mounds and trenches drawn across the neck. The castle, an uninteresting ruin, occupies a natural mound artificially shaped; it was long the Stannary prison. The waterfall is graceful rather than fine, a steep slide of seventy feet in height in the midst of woods. From this the river Lyd should be ascended for three miles by a path through a ravine that grows in grandeur till it is spanned by a bridge. The ascent may well be continued to Kits Steps, another fall of a totally different character, much spoiled by refuse -heaps from an abandoned mine. From Lydford a visitor should take a walk across the shoulder of Hare Tor to the rocks of Tavy Cleave, perhaps the grandest scene on Dartmoor.