The question at once springs to our lips, Who raised these enormous
blocks of stone, and set them up in so exact a fashion? It is one
which learned men are unable to answer. The general opinion is that
Stonehenge was formed as a temple for the worship led by the Druids,
the priests of the ancient Britons, but of this one cannot be certain.
The men who built Stonehenge have left no other record of their mighty
labours save the vast stones they raised, and the secret of this most
ancient monument is lost in the darkness of prehistoric days.
ROUND THE TORS.
If we journey on south-west beyond the chalk ranges of Wessex we come
to a very different country indeed: we enter on a land of granite
hills. The granite rocks are as different as possible from the chalk
heights. Instead of rounded slopes, we see sharp, jagged peaks and
broken, rocky ridges. The smooth, open stretches of turf are exchanged
for wild, heathery moorland, broken by deep dells, and the waterless
chalk slopes are replaced by glens, through which leap foaming torrents.
The granite hills rise to their wildest at Dartmoor, in the centre of
the county of Devon. Dartmoor is a great tableland, from which spring
granite heights rising to nearly 1,800 feet above the sea. For the
most part Dartmoor is uncultivated, a wilderness of barren moorland,
with lofty hills and jagged tors on every hand, here and there scored
by narrow valleys, which are often strewn with huge boulders of granite.
The tors are huge knobs or humps of granite, and the word has the same
meaning as "tower." The most famous of them all is Yes Tor. Round
these tors stretch great sweeps of moor and morass. Nothing lives here
save the moorland sheep, who crop the rough grass between the tufts of
heather, and the hardy moor ponies--nimble, shaggy, little creatures,
with long manes and tails, quick as deer and surefooted as goats.
In the midst of this desolate country stands a great prison--Dartmoor
Convict Prison. The place was chosen so that no convict could hope to
escape. Many of the prisoners go out by day to work in the fields
around the prison. They are closely watched by warders armed with
rifles. But for all that, now and again a convict makes an attempt to
escape; yet, though he sometimes gets away from the warders and is free
for a few hours, he is almost certain to be recaptured. He finds that
he has only got into a larger prison--the prison of the moorland.
There are no woods, so he cannot hide himself, and he cannot strike
which way he pleases, for there are the bogs to think of.
[Illustration: IN AN ENGLISH LANE]
In many places there are deep morasses in which a man would sink and be
swallowed up by the soft mud. So the escaped prisoner dare not move by
night lest he should run into a bog; then by day, if he attempts to
traverse the country, he is soon seen; so that it is almost impossible
to escape from Dartmoor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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