The place is by nature very strong, and it dominates two roads, that from Exeter to Cornwall, and that which branched off from it on Sourton Down and struck through Sourton to Lydford. The name Gavulford signifies the holdfast on the _fordd_ or road. Burleigh Camp is on the estate of Bidlake, an interesting old manor house, long the residence of a family of the same name, and deserving a visit. Old Squire Bidlake was a zealous Royalist, and the Parliamentary soldiers went to his house to seize him. As they entered the avenue they met an elderly tramp in rags, and said, "You fellow. Have you seen Squire Bidlake?" "Yes," he replied; "I've just come from the house, and when I was there he was in it." Then he went his way, and not till too late did they discover that this tramp was Squire Bidlake himself slipping away in disguise. He fled to Burleigh Wood. There is a little farm below it, in which, at the time, lived a tenant of the name of Veale. Veale and his wife and daughter concealed him in the underwood, and daily conveyed to him food, and supplied him with blankets till the search for him ceased. At the Restoration, Squire Bidlake made over the farm to the Veales on a nominal rent, to be held by them on this rent so long as a male Veale of their descent remained to hold it. Both Bidlakes and Veales are now gone, and the little farmhouse is a ruin. Squire Bidlake is supposed still to haunt the wood, and children are frightened by their mothers with the threat that the old squire will come and fetch them, if naughty. Lydford was strongly defended. It occupies a fringe of land between ravines, and lines of fortification were drawn across the neck. These may still be traced. The castle stands on a tump artificially shaped. Beyond the church is another small camp, probably British. The castle itself is a structure of stone, replacing the old Saxon _burrh_. It was probably from the bridges leading up into these citadels, which the Norsemen saw when they harried our coasts, that they conceived the idea that the rainbow was the great bridge leading up into Odin's Valhalla. "What fools the gods must be," says the inquirer in the Edda, "to build their passage of egress and ingress of such brittle stuff." FOOTNOTES: [11] _Archæologia Cambrensis_, July, 1899. The camp was excavated by Colonel W. L. Morgan. CHAPTER VIII TIN-STREAMING Remains of the tin-streamers--Dartmoor stream tin--Lode tin--The dweller in the hut circles did not work the tin--The tin trade with Britain--How tin was extracted--A furnace--Deep Swincombe--Blowing-houses--The wheel introduced in the reign of Elizabeth--Japanese primitive methods--Numerous blowing-house ruins--The tin-mould stones--Merrivale Bridge--King's Oven--Its present condition--Mining.