Sir Francis became possessor by purchase of Buckland Abbey (1581), which is not only beautifully situated, but is interesting. It is, in fact, the cruciform abbey church converted into an Elizabethan mansion. The nave has been floored, and the drawing-room upstairs is in it; the hall below is also in part therein. There is here some splendid plaster-work. The choir was pulled down and a kitchen wing built at right angles. In the grounds are some remarkably fine tulip trees. Buckland Monachorum Church is large, Perpendicular, but cold, and has a naked, unfurnished look internally from being without its screen. There are two points on no account to be missed by a visitor to Tavistock, and both can be combined in one drive or walk--the Raven Rock above the Virtuous Lady Mine, opposite the point where the Walla falls into the Tavy; the other the better known Morwell Rocks. The former, hardly inferior to the other, but less known, is reached from the Bere Alston road. At Morwell is the hunting-lodge of Abbot Courtenay, cousin of Bishop Grandisson, and appointed by him to Tavistock Abbey. It was a very unsatisfactory appointment. He alienated the property of the abbey, and allowed its buildings and discipline to fall into decay, and got the monastery into a debt equivalent to twenty thousand pounds of our money. All he cared for was sport, like the jolly monk in Chaucer's _Prologue_. The quadrangle, which was in a singularly untouched condition, with hall and butteries and kitchens, was somewhat wantonly mutilated some fifty years ago and turned into farmhouse and cottages. From Tavistock Lydford can be visited with ease. This was a very strong place at one time, a sort of inland cliff-castle, situated in a fork between ravines, with mounds and trenches drawn across the neck. The castle, an uninteresting ruin, occupies a natural mound artificially shaped; it was long the Stannary prison. The waterfall is graceful rather than fine, a steep slide of seventy feet in height in the midst of woods. From this the river Lyd should be ascended for three miles by a path through a ravine that grows in grandeur till it is spanned by a bridge. The ascent may well be continued to Kits Steps, another fall of a totally different character, much spoiled by refuse-heaps from an abandoned mine. From Lydford a visitor should take a walk across the shoulder of Hare Tor to the rocks of Tavy Cleave, perhaps the grandest scene on Dartmoor. Another excursion is to be made to Brent Tor, a subaqueous volcanic cone, crowned by a little church. The base of the hill has been fortified. The banks are most perfect on the east. The view from the top of the tor is remarkably extensive and fine. Endsleigh, the country seat of the Duke of Bedford, is almost unsurpassed in England for beauty of scenery. Mary Tavy Church has a good new screen, and Peter Tavy a scrap of an old one and remains of a magnificent early Tudor pew, wantonly demolished.