Page:Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries.djvu/447

 7^ The Ancient Stone Crosses The word is divided, the first three letters forming one line, and the remaining four another, directly under it thus : BOC LonD and this has caused some to imagine that there were two words. How the second syllable should have been read as Bond, I cannot conceive, for the L is plainly to be discerned. The other letters require a careful examination to determine what they are, but with a very close scrutiny the only one there will be found to be any doubt about is the third, which looks more like an O than anything else. This is, however, easily to be accounted for, as the wearing away of a very small portion of the stone would produce this appearance. It is this which has deceived those who have endeavoured to decipher the inscription, and together with the error of reading the first letter as an R instead of a B (another mistake which might easily occur) has led to the belief that the letters represented the word Roolande, but no one has ever suggested any reason why such a name should appear on the cross. Seven letters only can be seen : there does not appear to have been any final E. While, however, we can quite understand such a mistake as the foregoing happening at a period long subsequent to the letters being engraved, it is puzzUng to see how it could have arisen at a time when they would not only be plainly decipherable, but the meaning of them also be perfectly- understood, as must have been the case if the date of the map is to be referred to the thirteenth century. But this cir- cumstance prohibits our entertaining such a belief, unless the writing on the back can be shown to be of much later date than the map itself, for it is not possible that such an error as that of reading the name as Roolande could have arisen until long after the time when it was first engraved on the cross. It therefore appears that the map cannot boast of so great an antiquity as has been supposed ; but it may be a copy of an older map, in which case the description of the cross and the drawing of the church, must have been added when the copy was made."^- AssocUitiotty 1890- 1, refers to this map, and says that (he handwriting, shows it to be of the middle ur latter part of the fifteenth century.
 * Mr. Stuart A. Moore, in his Report to the Dartmoor Preservation