A Book of Dartmoor (With Sixty Illustrations)

"A Book of Dartmoor" is scholarly in substance, if not in style. It displays both sanity and shrewdness, two qualities mournfully lacking in the work of some past writers on the mysteries of Dartmoor. It is informed with close personal knowledge, extending over many years. In fair weather and in foul Baring-Gould has tramped the Moor. In his own person he has sounded the bogs—happily not to the very bottom, or we should not have had this book, yet far enough to feel for those who have gone further, and to dread their fate. He has plied the shovel among the old hut dwellings, cleared out the cooking holes, and formed a defensible opinion about their origin. He has surveyed the stone monuments, and ransacked literature for analogous usages lingering in remote corners of the earth. If we cannot wholly follow him to far Cathay in the effort to interpret things lying on the Dartmoor hills, we can at least admire the energy with which he sweeps into his net the customs of all nations, while for his constant watchfulness, his ceaseless efforts to stay the destroying hand of the farmer, and his untiring attempts to arouse the interest of landlords in the ancient monuments which they possess, we owe him hearty gratitude. The folklore he has not disdained: he has caught up the old songs, hiding their nakedness, it is true, with brand new gowns—but perhaps that was inevitable. He has noted traditions, and knows, we should think, as many tales about the Devil as most men.

Dartmoor is so vast, its beauty is so strange and wonderful! In most men it stirs some consciousness akin to awe; and few who have stood on the green sward by the rushing Dart beneath Holne Chase, in the springtime when the oaks are golden, and the bluebells fill the hollows as with an azure mist, or in August when the blood-red flush of heather spreads up the hillside among the granite boulders, can think of it without a sense of yearning, such as reflections are found in this book.

Would not Eden be a mere ordinary garden to any one of us, if we dwelt in it? In conclusion let it be said that Baring-Gould used this opportunity to smite the mighty in their seat, in other words to speak out what is clearly in his heart about the actions of the Duchy of Cornwall upon Dartmoor.