Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/381

Rh art manufacture, started by the late Mr. John Phillips, with the object of providing the village young men with remunerative work at their own homes. But about this presently. The story of the inception of the work is interesting.

Coffinswell still possesses its holy well, that is called the "Lady Well," used by young girls for fortune-telling.

At some little distance from this spring lies a nameless grave in unconsecrated ground, where is buried a lady banished holy ground for her sins. Every New Year's morn, after the stroke of mid-night, she rises and takes "one cock's stride" towards the churchyard, which, when she reaches, she will find rest, and her hope is to be found therein—at the crack of doom.

The three well-parishes lie about the stream of the Aller (W. allwy, to pour forth, to stream), that flows into the Teign below Newton Abbot. But it was not always so. At some remote period, when the great Dartmoor peaks "stood up and took the morning," far higher than they do now, the mountain torrents that swept the detritus of quartz from Hey Tor and Rippon Tor not only filled the lake of Bovey with pure white china clay, till they had converted a basin into a plain, but they also poured between red sandstone and limestone cliffs into the sea at Torbay. Then came a convulsion of nature; these latter formations rose as a wall across the bed of the torrent, and the spill of the granite upland passed down the Teign valley. Then the little Aller was formed of the drainage of the combes of