CHAPTER XII
1852-1856
AS my father had let Lew House when he went abroad, intending to expatriate himself for at least three years,we were constrained to take a furnished house in Tavistock, whence my father could drive over to Lew as required.
I enjoyed my time there, as it enabled me to get about on Dartmoor, and see the prehistoric remains with which it is literally strewn, though the interpretation of them was erroneous. These, at the time, were supposed to be Druidical.
The first pioneer of the Moor was the Rev,. Edward Atkyns Bray, Vicar of Tavistock. He saw, studied and described these remains as far as he could visit them on foot within a radius of a few miles of a house he had built for himself at Bairdown, above Two Bridges. The result of his researches was published in his wife's Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy, 1836, which consisted of a series of letters to Robert Southey. A fuller and more systematic exploration was made by Samuel Rowe and published under the title of Perambulation of Dartmoor, 1848. Happily, neither of these men employed the spade ; for neither of them was competent to read the writing of what would eventually be disclosed, as to the purport and period of these remains, to my friend Robert Burnard and myself, who were the actual Daniels to interpret them. At the time of which I write all these monuments were set down as Celtic and Druidical, and the most fanciful explanations of them were confidently advanced. As an instance of the short-sightedness of these antiquaries, I may mention the fact that Mr. Bray had rescued an inscribed stone, and had set it up in the vicarage garden, and Mrs. Bray gave an illustration of it and its inscription in the above-mentioned book. Not till many years after did a true antiquary see the stone, and he at once
212
