A Book of Dartmoor: Second EditionBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A Book of Dartmoor: Second Edition
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Dartmoor (England)
Innumerable relics on Dartmoor--Small in size--Great
destruction of them that has taken place--Lake-head Hill thus
devastated--Classification of the remains--1. The dolmen, an
ossuary--2. The kistvaen--Great numbers, all rifled--3. The stone
circle--possibly a crematorium--4. The stone row--Astonishing
numbers still existing--5. The menhir--In Christian times becomes
a cross--Story of S. Cainnech--Dartmoor crosses--Altar tombs--6.
Hut circles--All belong to one period--7. The tracklines--8. The
pounds--9. The cairns--10. The camps--11. Rude stone bridges,
comparatively modern.
As already intimated, the antiquities found on Dartmoor belong almost
exclusively to the Prehistoric Period. The few exceptions are the
crosses and the blowing-houses. These shall be spoken of in other
chapters. In this we will confine ourselves to a general review of
the relics left to show how that the moor was occupied by a large
population in the early Bronze Period.
Now, although these relics are very numerous, they are none of them
megalithic, that is to say, very huge. And this for two reasons. In
the first place it is uncertain whether the people occupying the moor
ever did erect any huge stones, like the Stonehenge monsters, or the
enormous dolmens of Brittany, and above all of the sandstone districts
of the Loire.
In the second place, in the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth
centuries the great bulk of the churches round Dartmoor were rebuilt,
and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the manor houses,
bartons, and farms were also reconstructed, and then for the first time
since the sixth century was granite employed in ecclesiastical and
domestic architecture. The builders delighted in selecting huge stones.
They employed monoliths for their pillars; each door and window had
a single stone on each side as a jamb, and a single stone as a base;
two stones above were used for the arch of every door and window. The
amount of granite of a large size carried away from the moor is really
prodigious, and no large monument was likely to have been spared.
Then came the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when granite was
in demand for gateposts, and every standing stone serviceable was
ruthlessly carried away. Almost every circle of upright stones has lost
some of its finest blocks in this way, and all that is left to show
where they were is the hole cut in the "calm" from which they were
extracted, and the _spalls_ or chips made by the quarrymen as they
knocked the block into shape. At Sherberton was a fine circle: the
three largest stones have been employed a few yards off as gateposts,
and two others have been cast down.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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