Enclosure is a mania that recurs at intervals; and deluded people think that, if they cut the moor up into fields, they will reap as much as in the valleys 1000 or 1500 feet below. It is noted in Moore’s _History of Devonshire_, vol. 1, page 486--“The speculators in these undertakings were in general but little versed in agriculture; and having inspected the country in a very cursory manner, were altogether mistaken with respect to the soil of Dartmoor, the produce for which it is adapted, and the methods to be pursued for its improvement: scarcely anyone in the neighbourhood had anything to do with these plans.” That was in 1829, and history repeats itself. The latest of these Dartmoor schemes has been for taking water from the streams to generate electricity. Such schemes answer very well abroad, in mountainous regions where there are large volumes of water at great heights coming down precipitously. But on Dartmoor the heights are relatively small, and the streams are far apart and never very large, shrinking in summer into brooks, so that big reservoirs would be required for maintaining the supply. I fancy the promoters of this scheme were merely copying a thing that enterprising men had done elsewhere, without considering whether such men would do the same thing here. It seems absurd to spend big sums of money on these moorland streams, when there are great tidal estuaries not many miles away. At the mouths of the Exe and the Teign the estuaries run several miles inland and have very narrow entrances: the tide comes in and out; and twice a day the whole of this gigantic power goes to waste. Dartmoor is often called a Forest and is marked as such on maps; but there are hardly any trees there now, and can never have been many. It was a Forest only in the legal sense; and that was long ago. Coke says in his _Institutes_, iv. 73, page 313, ed. 1798--“If the King, being seized of a Forest, grant the Forest to another in fee, the grantee shall have no Forest.” When the King granted the Forest of Dartmoor to the Earl of Cornwall, 10 October 1239, it ceased to be a Forest and became a Chase. It was granted to the Black Prince as the Chase of Dartmoor, 17 March 1336/7, when he was created Duke of Cornwall; and this is the grant by which the Duchy holds it now.