A Book of Dartmoor: Second EditionBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A Book of Dartmoor: Second Edition
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Dartmoor (England)
Of camps there are two sorts, but we cannot be sure that they belong to
different races of men. The stone-walled fortresses are few--Brent Tor,
Whit Tor, Cranbrook, one near Ashburton, and the Dewerstone. Of earth,
or earth and stone mixed, there are more. A small one above Tavistock,
an immense and very important one at Galford or Burleigh in Bridestowe,
one above the station at Okehampton, Wooston and Prestonbury on the
Teign, Holne and Hembury on the Dart. Along the south of the moor
are none till we reach Boringdon, between the Plym and the Tory. But
one only of all these has been systematically explored, and that is,
perhaps, the finest, on Whit Tor, above Mary and Peter Tavy.
Whit Tor rises to the height of 1,526 feet above the sea-level. It is
on Cudlipptown Down, and commands exceedingly fine views westward as
far as the distant Cornish hills.
The tor is not of granite, but of gabbro, an eruptive igneous rock,
very black and hard, and splitting along defined planes under the
action of the weather. The north side near the summit is covered with a
clitter of broken masses.
The boldest masses of rock rise on the south precipitously, but there
are fangs of rock that shoot up over the small plateau that forms the
summit of the hill.
The whole of the summit is surrounded by a double wall in a very
ruinous condition, and this is to a considerable extent due to the
smallness of the stones of which it was composed. The faces of the
walls were to be traced only by digging, and were never more than
doubtful.
Both walls appear to have been 10 feet thick, perhaps a little more;
the outer, when perfect, might have had a height of 4 to 4½ feet,
whilst the inner, judged by the débris, appears to have been 6 to 7
feet high.
The space between the walls varied, owing to the inequalities of the
ground, but was generally 10 feet wide.
The area inclosed by the innermost wall amounts to close on one and a
half acres; the total amount included within the outer wall is about
two and a half acres of ground.
The circumference is very much broken up, as is also the inclosed area,
by considerable masses of protruding rocks. About these, within the
camp, heaps of small stones had been piled up, forming cairns. The
largest and most notable of these is at the south-west, and consists
of a core of rock about which an immense accumulation of stones has
been heaped. All these cairns were thoroughly explored. They covered
no interments, and although they disclosed evidences that fires had
been lighted against the rocks, and that people had camped there for
a while, they showed no tokens of structural erection, as though they
were ruinous huts built against the native rock. The huge cairn was
removed with great labour, and revealed nothing whatever beneath it but
one flint flake.
These cairns, there can be little doubt, were collections of stones for
the use of the besieged, to serve as missiles, or for the repair of the
walls.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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