we meet their ghosts along the Abbots' Way by night we need not fear
that they will be other than kindly. If they are ghosts now, there was
a time when they drove forth ghosts themselves, and when they
converted pagan monuments into symbols of the religion of love.
It would be very pleasant to linger about Tavistock, with its bright
river that we met in our rambles from Lydford; but the moorland calls
us. There is another lovely river, the Walla or Walkham (Walkham is
probably Walla-combe), which lures us to one of the most fascinating
regions of Dartmoor. The poet Browne, after the fashion of his time,
wrote a narrative of the "loves of the Walla and the Tavy" in his
_Britannia's Pastorals_; but in spite of much freshness of natural
description his verses are tedious if taken in large doses, and we can
leave this would-be classic legend out of the question. The stream has
a typically moorland character as it flows from its source at Lynch
Tor, to wind around the foot of the noble Great Mis Tor and pass
beneath Merrivale Bridge. The tors of this district are approaching
their greatest height, and Mis Tor, a true mother of storms, is one of
the most magnificent. Merrivale bridge is on the highroad from
Tavistock to Princetown, little frequented since the opening of the
railway, and surely there are few finer bits of road in the kingdom
than that which here crosses the valley of the Walla, at the base of
this grand tor. Whether lying in open sunshine or raked with fog and
cloud, Mis Tor is always impressive, apart altogether from the
rock-basins, pounds, and hut-circles that surround it. Northward of
the bridge is Staple Tor; southward, nearer to the small village of
Sampford Spiney, are the Vixen and Pu tors. The Vixen is a curious
mass of weathered granite, taking almost any shape that the view-point
and the imagination of the spectator may suggest. At Sampford there is
a good Perpendicular church, and a picturesque granite-mullioned
farmhouse that was once a manor. There is another good church at
Walkhampton, and a fourteenth-century church-house, now the inn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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