A Book of Dartmoor: Second EditionBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A Book of Dartmoor: Second Edition
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Dartmoor (England)
According to popular belief the graves, which are cut in the volcanic
tufa, fill with water, and the dead dissolve into a sort of soup.
But this is not true; the rock is dry and porous. It discharges its
drainage by a little spring on the north-east that in process of ages
has worked itself from stage to stage lower down the hill.
The Dewerstone Camp consists of two stone walls drawn across the
headland. No walls were needed for the sides that were precipitous.
Cranbrook Castle is in very good preservation, except on the side
towards the Teign, where it has been removed by road-menders, but
not within recent years. It richly deserves to be investigated, and
the owners have recently granted permission to do so to the Dartmoor
Exploration Committee.
We come next to the earthen-banked camps. Of these there is a very fine
example at Hembury, near Buckfastleigh. But the finest of all is in
Burleigh Wood, in the parish of Bridestowe. Here the side accessible
from Galford Down has been cut through, with a trench and a bank thrown
up on the camp side, and this is carried right across the neck. The
earthen banks were almost certainly crested with palisades. Hard by
this early camp, where a bronze palstave has been found, is another of
a different character, occupying the extreme point of the hill. This
consists of a tump or mound, with an earthwork round it as a ring. In
this are remains of iron-smelting.
There can be little doubt as to the period of this latter. It was
the _burrh_ of the Anglo-Saxon, and was in every point similar to
the _mottes_ of the Merovingians in France. On the Bayeux tapestry
three fortified places are represented--Dinan, Dol, and Rennes--and
all are of the same type. A mound of earth was either thrown up, or a
hilltop was artificially shaped like a tumulus. On the top of this the
_thegn_ erected his fortress of wood. In the Bayeux representations the
superstructures at Dol and Rennes are of timber, and that of Dinan is
partly of timber and partly of stone. A flying bridge of wood led from
the gate in the palisading of the outer ring, supported on posts, and
conducted by an incline to the gate of the citadel. An example of one
of these camps at Bishopston in Gower has been explored recently.[11]
The stumps of the pales were there found embedded in the clay of the
bank, in tolerable preservation.
In the valley below Burleigh Camp, commanding the ancient road from
Exeter by Okehampton to Launceston, was a third camp, that has been for
the most part obliterated; it occupied a rising knoll of limestone, and
this latter has been quarried, so that the camp earthworks have been
either destroyed or buried under the accumulations from the quarry.
The locality is of great interest. The ridge goes by the name of
Galford, and there is reason to think that this was the Gavulford of
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where, in 823, the Britons made their last
stand against Egbert and the Saxons of Devon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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