A Book of Dartmoor: Second EditionBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A Book of Dartmoor: Second Edition
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Dartmoor (England)
That the occupants of the moor at this remote period loved to play
at games is shown by the numbers of little round pebbles, carefully
selected, some for their bright colours, that have been found on the
floors of their huts. That they used divination by the crystal is shown
by clear quartz prisms having been discovered tolerably frequently.
These are still employed among the Australian natives for seeing
spirits and reading the future.
That these early people were monogamists is probable from the small
size of their huts; they really could not have accommodated more than
one wife and her little family.
That they were a gentle, peaceable people is also apparent from the
rarity of weapons of war. Plenty of flint scrapers are found for
cleaning the hides, plenty of rubber-stones for smoothing seams, plenty
of small knives for cutting up meat, but hardly a spear-head, and
arrow-heads are comparatively scarce. Their most formidable camp is at
Whit Tor, the soil of which is littered with flint chips. It did not,
on exploration, yield a single arrow-head. The pounds were inclosed
to protect the sheep and young cattle against wolves, not to save the
scalps of their owners from the tomahawks of their fellow-men.
With regard to the numbers of people who lived on Dartmoor in
prehistoric times, it is simply amazing to reflect upon. Tens of
thousands of their habitations have been destroyed; their largest and
most populous settlements, where are now the "ancient tenements," have
been obliterated, yet tens of thousands remain. At Post Bridge, within
a radius of half a mile, are fifteen pounds. If we give an average of
twenty huts to a pound, and allow for habitations scattered about, not
inclosed in a pound, and give six persons to a hut, we have at once a
population, within a mile, of 2,000 persons.
[Illustration: FLINT SCRAPERS.
(Actual size.)]
Take Whit Tor Camp. To man the wall it would require 500 men. Allow to
each man five noncombatants; that gives a population of 2,500. There
are pounds and clusters of hut circles in and about Whit Tor that still
exist, and would have contained that population. Take the Erme valley,
high up where difficult of access; the number of huts there crowded on
the hill slopes is incredible. On the height is a cairn, surrounded
by a ring of stones, from which leads a line of upright blocks for a
distance of 10,840 feet. Allow two feet apart for the stones, that
gives 5,420 stones. If, as is probable, each stone was set up by a
male member of a tribe, in honour of his chief who was interred in the
cairn, we are given by this calculation a population of over 21,000,
allowing three children and a female to each male.
[Illustration: FRAGMENT OF COOKING-POT.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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