A Day on Dartmoor

PROUD and poetical as are the Quantock Hills, exciting to the spirits as Exmoor is, neither of these West Country ranges can be compared to Dartmoor Forest, that vast tract of waste land, so stern and formidable in character, which to the extent of an area of two hundred square miles sprawls itself over Devonshire. If the Quantocks suggest what is lyrical in literature and Exmoor a ballad quality, Dartmoor may be said to affect one as some grave passage from the Scriptures, a passage designed by the men of the old time to bring home to the apprehension the impermanence of mortal life.

A few days spent on the moors, and one grows accustomed to such a habit of thought. However brightly the sun may shine, however high the clouds may float across the heavens, however much the tumbling streams may glisten and sparkle, or the rowan trees delight the eye with their windless shivering, it is impossible to be in the forest for any length of time without giving heed to this solemn and insistent homily. It is as if the Tors themselves, those granite monuments of obdurate matter, were visible tokens carved out of eternity. For how perdurable these huge heaps of boulders can look, — Yes Tor, High Willhays, Haytor, — each one of them a doomsday temple under the sun, offering shelter and sanctuary to the prick-eared fox and a resting place for the sentinel buzzard.

Before these uncouth altars celebrating the cosmic rift of the earth’s birth the lives of bird, animal, and fish appear but as shadows of the homeless wind, as shadows of the careless breath of God. Like somnolent saurians of prodigious girth the long gray rocks lie one upon another as in the tropics I have seen crocodiles do, flat head to dragon tail, dragon tail to flat head. Before such indestructible masses of petrifaction the spine of a trout, so slim and pliable in its shade of quick flesh, seems how light! The contrived body of a restless bird, how fleeting! And our own bones, with their supple kneecaps, their crab-pot ribs, their hollow skulls, as akin to dust, and as frangible, as rods and beakers of clay.

There is a celebrated line in Homer which can be translated: ’Like to the race of leaves the race of man is.’ On a Dartmoor gravestone I read these words: ‘We be as leaves’—words showing that in the eighteenth century the thought of the men of the moor was not very different from thought among the Isles of Greece three thousand years ago. Yet how glad and gay on a bright May morning Steeperton can look, with her twin mountain rivers tossing their waters over the rocks in diminutive falls of dazzling spray, or gathering them into their deep pools where in amber, far below, the trout remain poised with heads pointing upstream. If you follow either of these streams to the watershed near Cranmere Pool, you will be well recompensed. When Confucius sat by running water his disciples noticed that before long he would fall to weeping. They tried to discover why this was so, and eventually surmised that the movement of the water put the sage in mind of the flowing, flowing, flowing away of all earth life — the old man, hoar-bearded and with skin apple-wrinkled in the sun, and the child at the door, the one and the other scarcely more lasting than poppy petals so soon to fall.

In their eagerness to invalidate the integrity of our earth senses, the idealists contend that without mind there exists no objective reality. On these river banks, with sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste uniting their testimony, such sophistries are easily discounted. I looked into a recess between two rocks where in the darkness of a mighty miniature cascade a piece of suspended moss, drenched and enduring, was being thrown backward and forward by the cold rushing torrent. My consciousness was the sole witness of this event, of this actual physical happening in an apex of time, and for certain my perceptive identity was envisaging the significant form of a parcel of atoms that made up a sure and absolute reality. Doubt not, this chilled scrap of herbage would have been tossing, so and not otherwise, had I never happened to rest where I chanced to see it. Apart from my intelligence, apart from the intelligence of God, it had its own terrifying existence. However far into the firmament I fling my merlin mind, to the moon’s frozen escarpments or to the margins of our island universe, this morsel of moss still preserves its same condition of positive being.

Scarcely had I looked up from meditating upon the verity of poetry as proved by so puny a tassel when i saw upon a rock not twenty yards away a ring ousel; lightly, lightly it flew upstream, dancing over the drab boulders with its distinguishing white collar easily visible in the blithe sunshine. Presently I approached the wildest part of the moor, with bogs and mires in every direction, a kind of Siberian tundra, and it was just here that there was carried to me over the tufted heather, over the bog cotton, the clear incorrigible call of a cuckoo. With all the meadows of Devonshire to choose from, I was amazed that this bird should have penetrated to such a wilderness. How could it have deserted for so barren a waste the leafy lane behind the Oxenham Manor, behind that ancient dwelling house which, for all that it solidly stands in South Tawton, so strangely suggests to a traveler a French chateau, and remains to-day very much as it was in Elizabethan times when a son of the house left its rabbiting winter hedges, its pink campion summer hedges, to go the Spanish Main and to be hung at Lima? What was this feckless popinjay doing on these high dun-colored platforms tumbling after ‘his aunts’ in a wild rowan tree with open beak and cocked fantail? Here is no canton for this hawk of Dionysos, for this enemy of duty and domesticity, for this free bird whose native habitat is a flaming swamp in the Congo or the Cameroons. I also heard the lark everywhere. Above the dry grass, above the dry open soil, above the boulders, the air was quivering with the ecstatic music of this possessed, intoxicated spirit, heedless of everything but the joy of being alive, magically transformed out of an inert clod into a handful of buoyant feathers, with its mate, its dusky darling, hidden below, her speckled breast pressed to the peat.

Some thirty or forty years ago Scotch sheep were brought to Dartmoor. It was thought that with their long fleeces they would be able to withstand better than the original close-wooled Dartmoor breed the cold mists of the winter. I have never seen a true Dartmoor sheep, but the Scotch sheep are now everywhere with their black faces peering at you from behind rocks, then running off with their long fleecy mantles, which reach almost to their hoofs, jerking up and down. Tom Coryat declared that it was a custom with the Venetian nobility for anyone who had lived wildly to be buried in the habiliments of a monk, so that when the last trump sounded he could at least make an essay in such a disguise to pass himself off as one of the religious. These sheep reminded me of this hearsay, as though so many quadruped devils were playing domino in pontifical wool-white copes.

At the mere sight of my figure in the distance the Dartmoor ponies cantered away. It is sad to think that every year some of them valued highly for their toughness and littleness are sold to coal owners to be used for hauling in the pits. I can hardly imagine a more abrupt and wicked change of circumstance for one of these animals. For years enjoying the godlike freedom of a wild creature, accepting the fair weather with frolic, and enduring foul weather by turning its hindquarters to the drifting wet; at night couchant in the heather, audibly breathing with hard hoofs tucked under sensible abdomen in the stillness of the moonlight, in the silence of starshine — and then to be suddenly roughly haltered by a man smelling of sweat, and transported along pitchy tunnels to the earth’s depths, never to feel the sun’s warmth penetrating its hide again, to remain buried underground, dragging, dragging, dragging out its life, long after it has become blind, released only on some scarcenoticed afternoon when the broken carcass of a dead pit pony awaits the arrival of the knacker’s lorry at the pit’s head! Surely to a Dartmoor pony arbitrary man can appear as no spiritlike being, either in the turmoil of Tavistock Fair or in the gnome-lit stable where he fills black coal mangers with bottles of scant and dusty hay from the daytime world. Indeed, are any of us far removed from our primitive ancestors? Do not our emotional interests at every chance dominate our reason, so that this priceless endowment finds its chief task in justifying enterprises that have little enough of heaven in them?

It is curious that no remains of palæolithic man have ever been found on Dartmoor. It was the later neolithic peoples, the men of the bronze age, who set up cromlechs and stone circles upon the rough plains or projecting against the sky line like jagged teeth. How these enormous stones span the long centuries, beacon signals of intelligence out of an inconceivable past! The conception of a perfect circle, of a mystical circumference which from the earliest times, because of its applelike, moonlike, sunlike form, has fascinated man’s imagination, was brought to Dartmoor out of Egypt, a religious legacy from those days of illumined intimations and sublime wonder when man first stood upon his feet, fresh fashioned by a God out of the slab mud at the bottom of the Nile.

Below Cawsand Beacon, near the head of a wide swamp on the high margin of the moor, I came upon an alignment of stones, once placed in order, I suppose, for ceremonial purposes. They stand in three ranks and seem arranged to impart a certain prominence, perhaps for sacrificial reasons, to a large monolith. It was here that I left the moor, climbing down to a number of those walled-in plots of cultivated ground that, belonging to ‘venville’ crofters, on every side of Dartmoor mark man’s pertinacious encroachments upon the obstinate heath. I soon became aware of a primitive sound peculiar to man. I have heard it in the heart of Africa and near a camp of red Indians in the Rocky Mountains — the sound of iron striking upon stone! I looked over the wall, and in the small field saw an old laborer breaking up a protruding rock, using for his purpose a peculiar hatchetshaped hammer. I spoke to him, asking him about the rows of stones under the Beacon.

‘I have been told,’ he said, ‘that they stones be graveyard stones.’

‘But what kind of men would ever choose to be buried in such a place?’ I asked.

‘Folk such as you be, and folk such as I be, but without no scholarship for to read or write and without no knowledge of Him, the blessed, whom they Jews did serve so terrible bad.’

This unanticipated turn to the conversation roused my curiosity about the stone breaker’s beliefs, and I found him to be a devout Quaker.

It was to him that I owed my discovery of the Quaker graveyard at Sticklepath. I reached it by a narrow lane that leaves the main street of the village behind the great water wheel of the mill. I do not think I have ever seen a graveyard I like better. Under a tall elder hedge was a high stone on which were carved these words: —

Phil. IV, 3. Whose names are in the Book of Life. In this consecrated ground are interred the bodies of the pious Quakers late residents in this village who in the year 1745 and after welcomed and entertained the Wesleys and others as they journeyed to preach the gospel through the West.
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers.
Heb. XIII, 2

Wherever I looked in this small enclosure, hardly larger than an ass’s paddock, I was aware of a certain homely style that seemed natural to these Quakers, as if their spiritual sincerities and simplicities had admitted them to an understanding of the more ancient pieties. Because their feeling was sound, a certain dignity of utterance became native to them. On one stone I read, ‘Her happy spirit fled from earth to heaven,’ and there was another put up to the memory of a boy ‘whom God’s finger touched and he slept June 12th.’

I was especially charmed by the discovery of an arbor embowered by honeysuckle. It was just such a summerhouse as Christian was resting in when he lost his Roll, halfway up on the Hill of Difficulty. It must have been put up, I think, sometime at the end of the eighteenth century. Inside the retreat was a white wooden circular seat where five or six mourners could rest and meditate upon the uncertainty of human life, its fugitive quality — the span of days of an octogenarian Quaker, in such a place, seeming to be contracted, as it were, to the duration of a summer’s morning.

The walls of this delightful garden house were adorned with three scrolls. Two of these scrolls had suitable passages from the Scriptures written upon them. The third and central one presented a poem by Montgomery. The poet’s name was not unfamiliar to me. It was a habit with my father at our homo at Montacute to distinguish Sundays from week days by reading a hymn before family prayers, and as I would sit watching white cabbage butterflies passing freely in zigzag flights over the flower beds outside the window I would often hear this name gravely pronounced with the closing of the book; for, although my father in a general way remained unimpressed by literary achievements, he always seemed concerned that these hymn poets should receive their due of honorable fame.

Even in those days I did not think that Montgomery’s gentle talent was of much importance to English literature. Yet with the sound of the mill stream in my ears, with green-enfolded trees sheltering the place on every side, with an old-fashioned rose at the arbor door, I could imagine no poem more fitting to the mood of that afternoon — a gentle vesper music, utterly innocent, to end so happy a day.