Its varied and peculiar features, its vast expanses of wild and desolate moorland, now aglow with golden gorse, and now still more splendid with the magnificent purple of its broad sheets of heather or with the warm hues of dying bracken, and beautiful, as the seasons change, with the varying tints of grass and sedge, of ferns and rushes, of moss and bog-myrtle and bilberry, of cotton-grass and asphodel; the almost unrivalled beauty of its river-valleys, its multitudinous streams, its wild life, its extraordinary wealth of prehistoric antiquities, its lingering superstitions of pixies, of witch-craft, of night-flying whisht-hounds and ghostly huntsmen, its very solitude and silence, combine to make Dartmoor, to the antiquary and the artist, the naturalist and the angler, one of the most attractive spots in England, and one whose charm poets, painters, and authors have striven from earliest days to immortalise. The greater part of Exmoor, and all its principal heights, are in Somerset, but it extends into the north-eastern corner of Devon, and detached portions of it, which appear to be really parts of the same upland, reach to the hills above Combe Martin. Part of Span Head, whose summit is 1619 feet above the sea, is in our county; and the outlying spurs of Bratton Down, Kentisbury Down, and the Great Hangman are all over 1000 feet high. There is very beautiful scenery on Exmoor, especially on the Somerset side of the border, somewhat resembling that on Dartmoor, although less wild and picturesque, and without any of the tors which are so characteristic of the greater upland. Exmoor is the only part of England where red deer still run wild; and the district is visited every year by stag-hunters from all parts of the island and especially from Ireland. Both it and Dartmoor are famous for a breed of sturdy little ponies, originally, no doubt, of the same stock. In the Badgeworthy Valley, which is in Somerset, although not far from Lynton, may be seen what are said to be the ruined huts of the Doones, a community of freebooters immortalised by Blackmore, who represents them as having been the terror of the country-side towards the close of the seventeenth century. Other Devonshire hills are the Black Downs, along the border of Somerset, in which the highest point is 860 feet above the sea; another Black Down, six miles due south, reaching 930 feet; the Great Haldons, south-west of Exeter, 817 feet high; and Dumpdon Hill, about two miles north by east of Honiton, 856 feet above sea-level.