The tors are remarkable for their quaint fantastic outlines, which, like the clouds, suggest all manner of strange similitudes--to dragons, and griffins, and hoary ruins, and even to human forms of gigantic size, apparently confronting the traveller as the lords and natural denizens of the rugged waste. The principal summits are Yes Tor, Cawsand Beacon, Fur Tor, Lynx Tor, Rough Tor, Holne Ridge, Brent Tor, Rippen Tor, Hound Tor, Sheep's Tor, Crockern Tor, and Great Mis Tor. Not only must their variety of form delight the artist, but his eye rests well pleased on their manifold changes of colour; purple, and green, and gray, and blue--now softened by a delicate vaporous shadow, now glowing with intense fulness in the sun's unclouded light. Dartmoor is traditionally reputed to have been anciently clothed with forest. The sole relic now existing is the lonely _Wistman's_ Wood, which occupies a sombre valley, bounded on the one side by Crockern Tor, on the other by Little and Great Bairdown; the slopes being strewn with gray blocks of granite in "admired disorder," as if the Titans had been at their cumbrous play. Starting from this chaos of rocks, appears a wood or grove of dwarf weird-looking oaks, interspersed with the mountain-ash, and everywhere festooned about and garlanded with ferns and parasitical plants. None of these trees exceed twelve feet in height, but at the top they spread far and wide, and "branch and twist in so fantastic and tortuous a manner as to remind one of those strange things called mandrakes." Their branches are literally covered with ivy and creeping plants, and their trunks so thickly embedded in a coating of moss that at first sight, says Mrs. Bray, "you would imagine them to be of enormous thickness in proportion to their height. Their whole appearance conveys to you the idea of hoary age in the vegetable world of creation; and on visiting Wistman's Wood it is impossible to do other than think of those 'groves in stony places' so often mentioned in Scripture as being dedicated to Baal and Astaroth."[15]