A Book of Dartmoor: Second EditionBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A Book of Dartmoor: Second Edition
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Dartmoor (England)
Where the Okebrook drops into the West Dart is an old blowing-house,
with moulds for the tin, ruined, and with a stout oak growing up in the
midst. There are also mortar-stones in the ruin. Above Huccaby Bridge
are the remains of a fine circle of standing stones that has been sadly
mutilated. Another, far more perfect, is at Sherberton.
Near the bridge is Jolly Lane Cot, the house of Sally Satterleigh,
that was built and occupied in one day. Her father was desirous of
marrying a wife and bringing her to a home; but he had no home to
which to introduce her, and the farmers round not only would afford no
help, but proved obstructive. One day when it was Holne Revel, and the
farmers had gone thither, the labouring people assembled in swarms,
set to work and built up the cottage, and before the farmers returned,
lively with drink, from the revel, the man was in the cottage and had
lighted a fire on the hearth, and this constituted a freeholding from
which no man might dispossess him. This man was a notable singer, and
his old daughter, now a grandmother, remembered some of his songs.
One wild and stormy day, Mr. Bussell, of Brazen Nose College, now Dr.
Bussell and tutor of his college, drove over with me from Princetown to
get her songs from her.
But old Sally could not sit down and sing. We found that the sole way
in which we could extract the ballads from her was by following her
about as she did her usual work. Accordingly we went after her when she
fed the pigs, or got sticks from the firewood rick, or filled a pail
from the spring, pencil and notebook in hand, dotting down words and
melody. Finally she did sit to peel some potatoes, when Mr. Bussell
with a MS. music-book in hand, seated himself on the copper. This
position he maintained as she sang the ballad of "Lord Thomas and the
Fair Eleanor," till her daughter applied fire under the cauldron, and
Mr. Bussell was forced to skip from his perch.
Holne forms the extreme eastern end of a long ridge that terminates
to the west in Down Tor. This hog's back stands over 1,500 feet above
the sea, and is the watershed. From it stream the Avon, the Erme, the
Yealm, and the Plym in a southerly direction, and north of it are
the West Dart and the Swincombe river. It is a rounded back of moor,
without granite tors, thickly sown with bogs. But there is a track,
the Sandy Way, that threads these morasses from Holne, and leads to
Childe's Tomb, a kistvaen, with a cross near it.
The story is well known.
A certain Childe, a hunter, lost his way in winter in this wilderness.
Snow fell thick and his horse could go no further.
"In darkness blind, he could not find
Where he escape might gain,
Long time he tried, no track espied,
His labours all in vain.
"His knife he drew, his horse he slew
As on the ground it lay;
He cut full deep, therein to creep,
And tarry till the day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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