Devon (England) -- Social life and customs; Wreyland (England)
There is a curious circle at Dûris in the Lebanon valley, and I went to
see it, 31 March 1882. It has eight upright stones, about twelve feet
high and six apart, with others laid on top of them like lintels, as in
the outer circle at Stonehenge. So far as a circle can be said to point
to anything, this circle points to Mecca, a Roman sarcophagus being set
up on end in one of the intervals between the uprights, and thus forming
a niche for the mihrâb. The uprights are drums of columns and the
lintels are squared stones, evidently taken from a temple or some other
building of Greek or Roman times. So the circle is comparatively modern,
yet its builders were aiming at the same effect as the builders of
Stonehenge.
Those rough stones on Dartmoor show no signs of high antiquity. The
avenues might be tracks for driving sheep or cattle, and the circles
might be pounds for penning them in; and some may really be no more than
that. But the circles often have a grave in the centre, and the avenues
sometimes have one at the end; and the graves have urns and implements
and weapons as ancient as the Bronze Age or the last half of the Stone
Age.
People are much too fond of giving those Ages definite dates, say 1500
or 1000 B.C. for the change from Stone to Bronze and 500 B.C. for the
change from Bronze to Iron. In reality these Ages must have overlapped,
surviving in some regions long after they died out in others; and there
may have been people out on Dartmoor using bronze and flint long after
Exeter was occupied by Romans.--A friend has given me a fancy portrait
of some progenitor of mine out there denouncing their new-fangled notion
of living in houses, instead of living in hut-circles as everybody
should. I think it was inspired by something that I said about the
comfort of having good thick walls and thatch, instead of merely brick
and slate, when the weather is either hot or cold.
These hut-circles differ from those other circles in being formed of
granite slabs set up on edge and touching one another, whereas those
others are formed of pillars standing some way apart and enclosing much
more ground. They probably had roofs of poles and thatch, looking like
bell tents, but the roofing has all gone. They are common enough in all
the Dartmoor district--there must be some thousands of them there--and
usually they are in little groups of three or four. Some of the larger
groups have ramparts round them; and these are known as Pounds. The
grandest is Grimspound, with an area of about four acres containing
five-and-twenty huts; but it has rather lost its dignity in these last
fifty years, as a good road was carried down the valley in 1874 and
comes within three hundred yards of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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