The Moor Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the small stoneware jug that held the metheglin) and returned with a glass in his other hand as well, which he placed on the table next to my chair before moving over to stand in front of the fire. He took a deep draught from his drink, put it down on the floor beside his foot (as there was no mantelpiece), and took up his pipe. I sank down into the arms of the chair, growing more apprehensive by the minute: All of this delay meant either that he was trying to decide how best to get around the defences that I thought I had already let down, or that he was uncertain in his own mind about how to proceed. Either way, it was not a good sign.

    He succeeded in getting his pipe to draw cleanly, retrieved his glass, and settled down in his chair, stretching his long legs towards the fire. Another slow draught half emptied the glass, and with his chin on his chest and his pipe in his hand, he looked into the fresh flames and began to speak.

    "As Gould intimated, Dartmoor is a most peculiar place," he began. "Physically it comprises a high, wide bowl of granite, some three hundred and fifty square miles covered with a thin, peaty soil and scattered with outcrops of stone. It functions as a huge sponge, the peat storing its rain all winter to feed the Teign, the Dart, the Tavy, and all the other streams and rivers that are born here. The floor of the moor is a thousand feet above the surrounding Devonshire countryside, from which it rises abruptly. It is a thing apart, a place unconnected with the rest of the world, and it is not inappropriate that a very harsh prison was set in its midst. Indeed, to many, Dartmoor is synonymous with the prison, although that facility is but a bump on the broad face of the moor."

    "I have seen the Yorkshire moors," I said.

    "Then you've a very rough idea of the ground here, but not of Dartmoor's special character. It is much more of a hortus conclusus, although this walled garden is no warm and fruitful paradise, but a rocky place of gorse and bracken. As Gould said, it does not generously part with its wealth. It is a land of great strength—men have broken their health and their fortunes trying to beat it down and shape it to their ends, but the moor wins out in the end. The men who chose to build a prison here set great value on breaking the spirits of the men they were guarding. The moor will not be farmed, nor made to grow any but the simplest crops. Tin miners have been the only men to draw much money from the place, and even they had to work hard for it. On a basic level, however, it has provided spare sustenance to its inhabitants for thousands of years: One finds mediaeval stone crosses mingling with neolithic ruins and early Victorian engine houses.

    "Most of the moor is a chase or forest, which as I'm sure you know does not necessarily mean trees, and here most emphatically does not. In this sense, a forest denotes a wild reserve for the crown to hunt, although I imagine the Prince of Wales must find the game somewhat limited on the moor itself, unless he is fond of rabbits. Much of it is a common, grazed by the adjoining parishes with fees collected at a yearly gathering up of the animals, called the 'drift.' Other parts of it are privately held, with an interesting legal right of a holder's survivors to claim an additional eight acres upon the death of each subsequent holder. These 'newtakes' at one time ate into the duchy's holdings, but are not often claimed now, because the traditional moor men are dying off, and their sons are moving to the cities. Do you know, when I was here thirty years ago it was not impossible to find a child of the moor who had never seen a coin of the realm? Now—" He gave out a brief cough of laughter. "The other day in the Saracen's Head pub, right out in the middle of the moor, one of the natives was singing an Al Jolson song."

    "You've been up on the moor, then? Recently?" I asked.

    "I travelled across it from Exeter, yes."

    A hike like that