A West Country Pilgrimage Part 3

A high wind roared over the tree-tops and sent the leaf flying--blood-red from the cherry, russet from the oak, and yellow from the elm. Rain and sunshine followed swiftly upon each other, and the storms hurtled over the forest, hissed in the river below and took fire through their falling sheets, as the November sun scattered the rear-guard of the rain and the cloud purple broke to blue. A great wind struck the larches, where they misted in fading brightness against the inner gloom of the woods, and at each buffet, their needles were scattered like golden smoke. Only the ash trees had lost all their leaves, for a starry sparkle of foliage still clung to every other deciduous thing. The low light, striking upon a knoll and falling on dripping surfaces of stone and tree trunk, made a mighty flash and glitter of it, so that the trees and the scattered masonry, that ascended in crooked crags above their highest boughs, were lighted with rare colour and blazed against the cloud ma.s.ses now lumbering storm-laden from the West.

The mediaeval ruin, that these woods had almost concealed in summer, now loomed amid them well defined. Viewed from aloft the ground plan of the castle might be distinctly traced, and it needed no great knowledge to follow the architectural design of it. The sockets of the pillars that sprang to a groined entrance still remained, and within, to right and left of the courtyard, there towered the roofless walls of a state chamber, or banqueting hall, on the one hand, a chapel, oratory and guard-room on the other. The chapel had a piscina in the southern wall; the main hall was remarkable for its mighty chimney. Without, the ruins of the kitchens were revealed, and they embraced an oven large enough to bake bread for a village. Round about there gaped the foundations of other apartments, and opened deep eyelet windows in the thickness of the walls. The ma.s.s was so linked up and knit together that of old it must have presented one great congeries of chambers fortified by a circlet of masonry; but now the keep towered on a separate hillock to the south-west of the ruin, and stood alone. It faced foursquare, dominated the valley, and presented a front impregnable to all approach.

This is the keep that Turner drew, and set behind it a sky of mottled white and azure specially beloved by Ruskin; but the wizard took large liberties with his subject, flung up his castle on a lofty scarp, and from his vantage point at stream-side beneath, suggested a n.o.bler and a mightier ruin than in reality exists. One may suppose that steps or secret pa.s.sages communicated with the keep, and that in Tudor times no trees sprang to smother the little hill and obscure the views of the distant approaches--from Dartmoor above and the valleys beneath. Now they throng close, where oak and ash cling to the sides of the hillock and circle the stones that tower to ragged turrets in their midst.

Far below bright Okement loops the mount with a brown girdle of foaming waters that threads the meadows; and beyond, now dark, now wanly streaked with sunshine, ascends Dartmoor to her border heights of Yes Tor and High Willhayes. Westerly the land climbs again and the last fires of autumn flicker over a forest.

I saw the place happily between wild storms, at a moment when the walls, warmed by a shaft of sunlight, took on most delicious colour and, chiming with the gold of the flying leaves, towered bright as a dream upon the November blue.

At the Conquest, Baldwin de Redvers received no fewer than one hundred and eighty-one manors in Devon alone, for William rewarded his strong men according to their strength. We may take it, therefore, that this Baldwin de Redvers, or Baldwin de Brionys, was a powerful lieutenant to the Conqueror--a man of his hands and stout enough to hold the West Country for his master. From his new possessions the Baron chose Ochementone[1] for his perch; indeed, he may be said to have created the township. With military eye he marked a little spur of the hills that commanded the pa.s.ses of the Moor and the highway to Cornwall and the Severn Sea; and there built his stronghold,--the sole castle in Devon named in Domesday. But of this edifice no stone now stands upon another.

It has vanished into the night of time past, and its squat, square, Norman keep scowls down upon the valleys no more.

[1] "Okehampton" is a word which has no historic or philological excuse.

The present ruins belong to the Perpendicular period of later centuries, and until a recent date the second castle threatened swiftly to pa.s.s after the first; but a new lease of life has lately been given to these fragments; they have been cleaned and excavated, the conquering ivy has been stripped from their walls, and a certain measure of work accomplished to weld and strengthen the crumbling masonry. Thus a lengthened existence has been a.s.sured to the castle. "Time, which antiquates antiquities," is challenged, and will need reinforcement of many years wherein again to lift his scaling ladders of ivy, loose his lightnings from the cloud, and marshal his fighting legions of rain and tempest, frost and snow.

THE GORGE

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GORGE.]

Reflection swiftly reveals the significance of a river gorge, for it is upon such a point that the interest of early man is seen to centre. The shallow, too, attracts him, though its value varies; it must ever be a doubtful thing, because the shallow depends upon the moods of a river, and a ford is not always fordable. But to the gorge no flood can reach.

There the river's banks are highest, the aperture between them most trifling; there man from olden time has found the obvious place of crossing and thrown his permanent bridge to span the waterway. At a gorge is the natural point of pa.s.sage, and Pontifex, the bridge-builder, seeking that site, bends road to river where his work may be most easily performed, most securely founded. But while the bridge, its arch springing from the live rock, is safe enough, the waters beneath are like to be dangerous, and if a river is navigable at all, at her gorges, where the restricted volume races and deepens, do the greatest dangers lie. In Italy this fact gave birth to a tutelary genius, or shadowy saint, whose special care was the raft-men of Arno and other rivers.

Their dangerous business took these _foderatore_ amid strange hazards, and one may imagine them on semi-submerged timbers, swirling and crashing over many a rocky rapid, in the throats of the hills, where twilight homed and death was ever ready to s.n.a.t.c.h them from return to smooth waters and sunshine. So a new guardian arose to meet these perils, and the boldest navigator lifted his thoughts to Heaven and commended his soul to the keeping of San Gorgone.

Sublimity haunts these places; be they great as the Grand Canon of Arizona and the mountain rifts of Italy and France, or trifling as this dimple on Devon's face of which I tell to-day, they reveal similar characteristics and alike challenge the mind of the intelligent being who may enter them.

Here, under the roof of Devon, through the measures that press up to the Dartmoor granite and are changed by the vanished heat thereof, a little Dartmoor stream, in her age-long battle with earth, has cut a right gorge, and so rendered herself immortal. There came a region in her downward progress when she found barriers of stone uplifted between her and her goal; whereupon, without avoiding the encounter, she cast herself boldly upon the work and set out to cleave and to carve. Now this glyptic business, begun long before the first palaeolithic man trod earth, is far advanced; the river has sunk a gulley of near two hundred feet through the solid rock, and still pursues her way in the nether darkness, gnawing ceaselessly at the stone and leaving the marks of her earlier labours high up on either side of the present channel. There, written on the dark Devonian rock, is a record of erosion set down ages before human eye can have marked it; for fifty feet above the present bed are clean-scooped pot-holes, round and true, left by those prehistoric waters. But the sides of the gorge are mostly broken and sloping; and upon the shelves of it dwell trees that fling their branches together with amazing intricacies of foliage in summer-time and lace-like ramage in winter. Now bright sunshine flashes down the pillars of them and falls from ledge to ledge of each steep precipice; it brightens great ivy banks and illuminates a thousand ferns, that stud each little separate knoll in the great declivities, or loll from clefts and crannies to break the purple shadows with their fronds. The buckler and the shield fern leap spritely where there is most light; the polypody loves the limb of the oak; the hart's tongue haunts the coolest, darkest crevices and hides the beauty of silvery mosses and filmy ferns under cover of each crinkled leaf. And secret waters twinkle out by many a hidden channel to them, bedewing their foliage with grey moisture.

On a cloudy day night never departs from the deepest caverns of this gorge, and only the foam-light reveals each polished rib and b.u.t.tress.

The air is full of mist from a waterfall that thunders through the darkness, and chance of season and weather seldom permit the westering sun to thrust a red-gold shaft into the gloom. But that rare moment is worth pilgrimage, for then the place awakens and a thousand magic pa.s.sages of brightness pierce the gorge to reveal its secrets. In such moments shall be seen the glittering concavities, the fair pillars and arches carved by the water, and the hidden forms of delicate life that thrive upon them, dwelling in darkness and drinking of the foam. Most notable is a crimson fungus that clings to the dripping precipices like a robe, so that they seem made of polished bloodstone, and hint the horror of some tragedy in these loud shouting caves. Below the ma.s.s of the river, very dark under its creaming veil of foam, shouts and hastens; above, there slope upwards the cliff-ma.s.ses to a mere ribbon of golden-green, high aloft where the trees admit rare flashes from the azure above them. Beech and ash spring horizontally from the precipices, and great must be the bedded strength of the roots that hold their trunks hanging there. With the dark forces of the gorge dragging them downward and the sunshine drawing them triumphantly up--between gravitation and light--they poise, destruction beneath and life beckoning from above. They nourish thus above their ultimate graves, since they, too, must fall at last and join those dead tree skeletons whose bones are glimmering amid the rocks below.

Here light and darkness so cunningly blend that size is forgotten, as always happens before a thing inherently fine. The small gorge wrought of a little river grows great and bulks large to imagination. The soaring sides of it, the shadow-loving things beneath, the torture of the trees above, and the living water, busy as of yore in levelling its ancient bed to the sea, waken wonder at such conquest over these fire-baked rocks. The heart goes out to the river and takes pleasure to follow her from the darkness of her battle into the light again, where, flower-crowned, she emerges between green banks that shelve gently, hung with wood-rush and meadow-sweet, angelica and golden saxifrage. Here through a great canopy of translucent foliage shines the noon sunlight, celebrating peace. Into the river, where she spreads upon a smooth pool, and trout dart shadowy through the crystal, the brightness burns, until the stream bed sparkles with amber and agate and flashes up in sweet reflections beneath each brier and arched fern-frond bending at the brink.

Nor does the rivulet lack correspondence with greater streams in its human relation; she is complete in every particular, for man has found her also; and dimly seen, amid the very tree-tops, where the gorge opens, and great rocks come kissing close, an arch of stone carries his little road from hamlet to hamlet.

THE GLEN

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GLEN.]

There is a glen above West Dart whence a lesser stream after brief journeying comes down to join the river. By many reaches, broken with little falls, the waters descend upon the glen from the Moor; but barriers of granite first confront them, and before the lands break up and hollow, a ma.s.s of boulders, piled in splendid disorder and crowned with willow and rowan, crosses the pathway of the torrent. Therefore the little river divides and leaps and tumbles foaming over the mossy granite, or creeps beneath the boulders by invisible ways. Into fingers and tresses the running waters dislimn, and then, that great obstacle pa.s.sed, their hundred rillets run together again and go on their way with music. By a descent that becomes swiftly steeper, the burn falls upon fresh rocks, is led into fresh channels and broken to the right and left where mossy islets stand knee-deep in fern and bilberry. Here spring up the beginnings of the wood, for the glen is full of trees.

Beech and alder, with scrub of dwarf willow at their feet, cl.u.s.ter on the islets and climb the deepening valley westward; but in the glen stand aged trees, and on the crest of the slope haggard spruce firs still fight for life and mark, in their twisted and decaying timbers and perishing boughs, the torment of the unsleeping wind. Great is the contrast between these stricken ruins with death in their high tops, and the sylva beneath sheltered by the granite hill. There beech and pine are prosperous and sleek compared with the unhappy, time-foundered wights above them; but if the spruces perish, they rule. The lesser things are at their feet and the sublimity of their struggle--their mournful but magnificent protest against destiny--makes one ignore the sequestered woodland, where there is neither battle nor victory, but comfortable, ign.o.ble shelter and repose. The river kisses the feet of these happy nonent.i.ties; they make many a stately arch and pillar along the water; in spring the pigeon and the storm-thrush nest among their branches; and they gleam with newly-opened foliage and shower their silky shards upon the earth; in autumn they fling a harvest of sweet beech mast around their feet. The seed germinates and thousands of cotyledon leaves appear like fairy umbrellas, from the waste of the dead leaves. The larger number of these seedlings perish, but some survive to take their places in fulness of time.

By falls and rapids, by flashing stickles and reaches of stillness, the little river sinks to the heart of the glen; but first there is a water-meadow under the hills where an old clapper-bridge flings its rough span from side to side. This is of ancient date and has been more than once restored against the ravages of flood since pack-horses tramped that way in Tudor times. Here the streamlet rests awhile before plunging down the steeps beyond and entering the true glen--a place of shelving banks and many trees.

In summer the dingle is a golden-green vision of tender light that filters through the beeches. Here and there a sungleam, escaping the net of the leaf, wins down to fall on mossy boulder and bole, or plunge its shaft of brightness into a dark pool. Then the amber beam quivers through the crystal to paint each pebble at the bottom and reveal the dim, swift shades of the trout, that dart through it from darkness back to darkness again. In autumn the freshets come and the winds awaken until a storm of foliage hurtles through the glen, now pattering with shrill whispers from above and taking the water gently; now whirling in mad myriads, swirling and eddying, driven hither and thither by storm until they bank upon some hillock, find harbour among holes and the elbows of great roots, or plunge down into the turmoil of the stream.

The ways of the falling leaf are manifold, and as the rock delays the river, so the trees, with trunk and bough, arrest the flying foliage, bar its hurrying volume and deflect its tide. In winter the glen is good, for then a man may escape the north wind here and, finding some snug holt among the river rocks, mark the beauty about him while snow begins to touch the tree-tops and the boughs are sighing. Then can be contrasted the purple ma.s.ses of sodden leaves with the splendour of the mosses among which they lie; for now the minor vegetation gleams at this, its hour of prime. It sheets every bank in a silver-green fabric fretted with liquid jewels or ice diamonds; it builds plump k.n.o.bs and cushions on the granite, and some of the mosses, now in fruit, brush their l.u.s.trous green with a wash of orange or crimson, where tiny filaments rise densely to bear the seed. Here, also, dwelling among them, flourishes that treasure of such secret nooks by stream-side, the filmy fern, with transparent green vesture pressed to the moisture-laden rocks.

Man's handiwork is also manifested here; not only in the felled trees and the clapper-bridge, but uniquely and delightfully; for where the river quickens over a granite ap.r.o.n and hastens in a torrent of foam away, the rocks have tongues and speak. He who planted this grove and added beauty to a spot already beautiful, was followed by his son, who caused to be carved inscriptions on the boulders. You may trace them through the moss, or lichen, where the records, grown dim after nearly a hundred years, still stand. It was a minister of the Church who amused himself after this fashion; but in no religious spirit did he compose; and the scattered poetry has a pleasant, pagan ring about it proper to this haunt of Pan.

Upon one great rock in the open, with its grey face to the south-west and its feet deeply bedded in gra.s.s and sand, you shall with care decipher these words:--

Sweet Poesy! fair Fancy's child!

Thy smiles imparadise the wild.

Beside the boulder a willow stands, its finials budding with silver; upon the north-western face of the stone is another inscription whose legend startles a wayfarer on beholding the bulk of the huge ma.s.s. "This stone was removed by a flood 17--."

On the islets and by the pathway below, sharp eyes may discover other inscribed stones, and upon one island, which the bygone poet called "The Isle of Mona," there still exist inscriptions in "Bardic characters."

These he derived from the _Celtic Researches_ of Davies. Furnished with the English letters corresponding to these symbols, one may, if sufficiently curious, translate each distich as one finds it. Elsewhere, beside the glen path, a sharp-eyed, little lover of Nature, tore the coat of moss from another phrase that beat us both as we hunted through the early dusk:--

Ye Naiads! venera

This was the complete pa.s.sage, and we puzzled not a little to solve its meaning. On dipping into the past, however, I discovered that the inscription was intended to have read as follows:--

Ye Naiads! venerate the swain Who joined the Dryads to your train.

The rhyme was designed to honour the poet's father, who set the forest here; but accident must have stayed the stone-cutter's hand and left the distich incomplete.

And now a sudden flash of red aloft above the tree-tops told that the sun was setting. Night thickened quickly, though the lamp of a great red snow-cloud still hung above the glen long after I had left it. Beneath, the ma.s.s of the beech wood took on wonderful colour and the streamlet, emerging into meadows, flashed back the last glow of the sky.

A DEVON CROSS

[Ill.u.s.tration: A DEVON CROSS.]

There are two orders of ancient human monuments on Dartmoor--the prehistoric evidences of man's earliest occupation and the mediaeval remains that date from Tudor times, or earlier. The Neolith has left his cairns and pounds and hut circles, where once his lodges cl.u.s.tered upon the hills. The other memorials are of a different character and chiefly mark the time of the stannators, when alluvial tin abounded and the Moor supported a larger population than it does to-day. Ruins of the smelting houses and the piled debris of old tin-streaming works may be seen on every hand, and the moulds into which molten tin was poured still lie in hollows and ruins half hidden by the herbage. Here also, scattered irregularly, the Christian symbol occurs, on wild heaths and lonely hillsides, to mark some sacred place, indicate an ancient path, or guide the wayfaring monk and friar of old on their journey by the Abbot's Way.

Of these the most notable is that venerable fragment known as Siward's Cross--a place of pilgrimage these many years.

Now, on this day of March, snow-clouds swept the desert intermittently with their grey veils and often blotted every landmark. At such times one sought the little hillocks thrown up by vanished men and hid in some hollow of the tin-streamers' digging to escape the pelt of the snow and avoid the buffet of the squall that brought it. Then the sun broke up the welter of hurrying grey and for a time the wind lulled and the brief white shroud of the snow melted, save where it had banked against some obstacle.

The lonely hillock where stands Siward's Cross, or "Nun's Cross," as Moormen call it, lies at a point a little above the western end of Fox Tor Mire. The land slopes gently to it and from it; the great hills roll round about. To the east a far distance opens very blue after the last snow has fallen; to the south tower the featureless ridges of Cator's Beam with the twin turrets of Fox Tor on their proper mount beneath them. The beginnings of the famous mire are at hand--a region of shattered peat-hags and mora.s.ses--where, torn to pieces, the earth gapes in ruins and a thousand watercourses riddle it. All is dark and sere at this season, for the dead gra.s.ses make the peat blacker by contrast. It is a chaos of rent and riven earth ploughed and tunnelled by bogs and waterways; while beyond this savage wilderness the planes of the hills wind round in a semicircle and hem the cradle of the great marshes below with firm ground and good "strolls" for cattle, when spring shall send them in their thousands to the grazing lands of the Moor again.

The sky shone blue by the time I reached the old cross and weak sunlight brightened its familiar face. The relic stands seven feet high, and now it held a vanishing patch of snow on each stumpy arm. Its weathered front had made a home for flat and clinging lichens, grey as the granite for the most part, yet warming to a pale gold sometimes. Once the cross was broken and thrown in two pieces on the heath; but the wall-builders spared it, for the monument had long been famous. Antiquarian interest existed for the old relic, and it was mended with clamps of iron, and lifted upon a boulder to occupy again its ancient site.

For many a year experts puzzled to learn the meaning of the inscriptions upon its face, and various conjectures concerning them had their day; but it was left for our first Dartmoor authority, William Crossing, who has said the last word on these remains, to decipher the worn inscription and indicate its significance. He finds the word "Siward,"

or "Syward," on the eastern side, and the word "Boc-lond," for "Buckland," on the other, set in two lines under the incised cross that distinguishes the western face of the monument.