On Sourton Down beside the road stands a cross of very coarse granite. On it is inscribed PRINCIPI FIL AVDEI, and above it an early and rude cross of Constantine. Some time in the Middle Ages the rudeness of the stone gave dissatisfaction, and its head was trimmed into a cross. A third occasion for the erection of crosses was as waymarks. Across Dartmoor such a succession of rude crosses exists where was what is called the Abbot's Way from Buckfast to Tavistock and to Plympton. But there are others not on these lines, and such may have served both as guiding marks and also as stations for prayer. That the monks of Buckland--and Buckland goes back to pre-Saxon times--did go out to the moor and there minister to the tin-streamers or squatters and shepherds, I cannot doubt, and accordingly look with much emotion at these grey monuments of early Christianity. The interlaced work which is found on some of the crosses is of the same character as the ornamentation in the early Irish MSS., and it was adopted from the Celtic clergy by their Anglian and Saxon converts. But whence came it? We know that the Britons delighted in plaited work with osiers, and it was with wattle that they built their houses, their kings' palaces, and defended their camps. By constant use of wattle through long ages they became extraordinarily skilful in devising plaits; and when they began to work on stone they copied thereon the delicate interlaced work they loved to exhibit in their domestic buildings.