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A West Country Pilgrimage, a non-fiction book by Eden Phillpotts |
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A Devon Cross |
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_ There are two orders of ancient human monuments on Dartmoor--the prehistoric evidences of man's earliest occupation and the mediæval remains that date from Tudor times, or earlier. The Neolith has left his cairns and pounds and hut circles, where once his lodges clustered 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 morasses--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 grasses 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. "Siward's Cross" is mentioned in the Perambulation of 1240. "It is named," says Mr. Crossing, "in a deed of Amicia, Countess of Devon, confirming the grant of certain lands for building and supporting the Abbey of Buckland, among which were the manors of Buckland, Bickleigh and Walkhampton. The latter manor abuts on Dartmoor Forest, and the boundary line, which Siward's Cross marks at one of the points, is drawn from Mistor to the Plym. The cross, therefore, in addition to being considered a forest boundary mark, also became one to the lands of Buckland Abbey, and I am convinced that the letters on it which have been so variously interpreted simply represent the word 'Bocland.' The name, as already stated, is engraved on the western face of the cross--the side on which the monks' possessions lay." Elsewhere he observes that Siward's Cross, "standing as it does on the line of the Abbot's Way, would seem not improbably to have been set up by the monks of Tavistock as a mark to point out the direction of the track across the Moor; and were it not for the fact that it has been supposed to have obtained its name from Siward, Earl of Northumberland, who, it is said, held property near this part of the Moor in the Confessor's reign, I should have no hesitation in believing such to be the case." No matter who first lifted it, still it stands--the largest cross on Dartmoor--like a sentinel to guard the path that extended between the religious houses of Plympton, Buckland and Tavistock. And other crosses there are beyond the Mire, where an old road descended over Ter Hill. But the Abbot's Way is tramped no more, and the princes of the Church, with their men-at-arms and their mules and pack-horses, have passed into forgotten time. Few now but the antiquary and holiday-maker wander to Siward's Cross; or the fox-hunter gallops past it; or the folk, when they tramp to the heights for purple harvest of "hurts" in summer-time. The stone that won the blessings of pious men, only comforts a heifer to-day; she rubs her side against it and leaves a strand of her red hair caught in the lichens. The snow began to fall more heavily and the wind increased. Therefore I turned north and left that local sanctity from olden time, well pleased to have seen it once again in the stern theatre of winter. It soon shrank to a grey smudge on the waste; then snow-wreaths whirled their arms about it and the emblem vanished. _ |
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