Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/294

284[February 20, 1869] haunts of the raven and the fox, granite altars, wooded hills, and noisy mill-streams, skims to that strangest of all the Devonshire logans, the Nutcracking Rock, on the rocky ridge by Lustleigh Cleave, not far from Monaton. This logan can be moved with a little finger, and the country boys crack nuts at the points where the keel of the logan strikes against its supporter. It is at Monaton, close by, that it is said there was once a monster of a snake that haunted the valley—a monster with a body as big as a man's, with real legs, broad sail wings, and a hiss that could be heard for miles. It is hard to account for the great prevalence of snake legends in Devonshire.

The crow strikes forth now for the source of the Dart, that river so sudden in its anger, so wild and tumultuous. The legend is that the river every year demands a victim.

The doomed man, till the day comes, ploughs calmly in the moorside villages, fishes in the Teign valley, drives on the western roads, hurries in the western trains, goes here, goes there, still, sooner or later, he comes, at the destined hour, to the river, swollen and clamorous for its victim, and, struggle as he may, is at once hurried to his death. Swift over the borders of Dartmoor, where the hills are crowned with granite ruins, and bogs and oak woods mingle with ploughlands and little green carpets of pasture, the bird alights on the grey tower of that bleak, out-of-the-world place, Widdicomb-in-the Moors, shut in by rocky hills, and surrounded by the sites of British villages, old roadways, and relics of strange Druid worship. This tranquil place, sheltered by its primeval sycamore trees, had a ghastly visit from King Death in October, 1638. The villagers were gathered in the church, the prayer was being said, the hymn sung, when gradually the air grew darker, and a storm began to gather. Alarmed looks were exchanged, the children drew closer to their mothers. Suddenly, after some flashes of cross lightning, a ball of fire burst through one of the windows, and broke, like a red-hot shell, among the frightened and scattering people. At the same moment the roof and tower were struck, the stones of the steeple fell in a shower, "as fast," says the local historian, "as if they had been thrown down by a hundred men," and a pinnacle of the tower also crashed in. Four persons were killed on the spot, and sixty-two were wounded, some by the fire and others by the stones. There could be no doubt of the author of this calamity. Some mysterious guilt must have rested upon the village, for an old woman who kept a little public-house on a lonely edge of the moor, remembered, that, just as church went in, a tall lame man dressed in black, riding a powerful black horse, inquired the way to Widdicomb Church, and called for a stoup of cyder. He wanted her to show him to the church, being afraid of losing his way on the moor, but the old woman was too cautious, for she observed that the cyder he drank smoked and hissed as it went down his throat, and, as he stumbled upon his horse, a palpable cloven hoof protruded from his boot. Half an hour after, this gentleman in black cast the fireball into Widdicomb Church.

The crow has now twenty miles of moor to flap its wings over. A desolate tract of coarse grass and reeds, whortleberry and moss; valleys thick bushed with fern and furze; central oozing masses of morass that swell and burst with the rain, and are the source of half the Devonshire rivers; bare wind-swept tors crowned with rocks that are now like ruined castles, now like giants and wild beasts; hills consecrated in old times to the gods of the Druids. Watchful over miles of heather, green moss, red grass, and rushes, the crow bears on in unimpeded flight, to that strange spot Cranmere Pool, that little bright oasis among the Dartmoor morasses, where the country people believe that lost spirits, purgatorially imprisoned, are to be heard at night when the wind is loudest, wailing in the bitterness of their despair.

The one hundred and thirty acres of Dartmoor, supposed to have been once a forest, were in King John's time an asylum for deer and wild cattle. Henry the Third gave them to Richard Duke of Cornwall, and in Edward the Third's reign they became part of the Duchy. No wonder that superstition still holds Dartmoor as a stronghold. Still, on wild stormy nights, when even the dwarf oaks of the Wistman's wood crouch lower before the blast, Woden the swart "master" is still heard urging his wish hounds from tor to tor, chasing the goblins from glen to glen. The brown man of the moors still starts up, to scare the traveller as he passes the workings of the old tin mines, and, in curdling mist or drifting snow, malicious pixies still mislead shivering travellers, and beguile them to their death. Many a horseman have the pixies led to "the Dartmoor stables," as the most dangerous of the morasses are sardonically called. By moonlight, too, under the tors, the pixies still hold their revels, and when ceasing to work man mischief, dance, feast, and sing.

The crow rests in its flight at Crockern Tor, because there the old Stannary court used to be held, and as late as 1749 the tinners met there in Parliament, and, seated on granite benches under the open sky of that cold damp region, discussed their preliminary ancient laws, and their disputes, before adjourning to one of the adjacent towns. There are records of an Earl of Bath in old times attending the meetings in this strange place, aaccompaniedaccompanied [sic] by several hundred retainers, and with half the country at his back. This was an old British custom of extreme antiquity. The Isle of Man has still its parliament hill, and it is well known that the ancient Britons held their assizes and great palavers, in the great stone circles and turf amphitheatres.

But it is up the stream of the Dart, in that ghostly valley bounded by Crockern Tor and Little and Great Bairdown, the slopes of which are strewn with countless tombstones of granite,