Dunkery Beacon is the highest peak in the West of England; it rises above Exmoor black and bold above bog and heather, commanding a view from the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire on the north to the high lands of Plymouth on the south-west, two hundred miles distant the one from the other. The great sweep of the Bristol Channel shines below it on the west, and beyond that lie the blue hills of Monmouthshire and Pembrokeshire; eastward the counties of Somerset, Devon, and Dorset lie under the eyes, and on a clear day it has been computed that no fewer than fifteen counties can be seen from this one eminence.
[Illustration: Dunkery Beacon, from Horner Woods]
So notable a height might well have been chosen by those Druid peoples as a fitting stage for the celebration of their worship, and the tradition which holds it "lucky" to climb the Beacon on a spring morning is just such a memory and faint superstition as lingers from an old and forgotten faith. The country-folk round Keswick used to drive their cattle up to the Druid circle on the hill-top near on the first of May, light a fire within the circle, and drive their cattle through the smoke "for luck," unconscious that they were remembering the worship of the god Moloch, to whom beasts and human beings were sacrificed at his Asiatic shrines by passing them through the fire.
On Dunkery Beacon, so far as I can ascertain, there are no remains of a Druid circle, but only two stone platforms arranged for beacon fires. As a beacon it has been used for many hundred years. In the time of Alfred the Great it flamed a warning of the coming of the Danes; it was doubtless lighted at the coming of William the Conqueror into the West; when the Armada went beating up the Channel; time and again when the rumour ran that Napoleon had started for these shores; the country-folk lighted it several times as a warning that the Doones were out on one of their raids, till one night they climbed the beacon and threw the watchman on the fire, after which it was left black and silent for all the evil that the Doones did, until in due course retribution overtook them and their stronghold was seized. So that I conjecture that the circle of stones (if there were one) was pulled down to build the beacon fires.