[7] KEETING _History of Ireland_ (ed. O'Connor, Dublin, 1841), i. P. 293.
Innumerable relics on Dartmoor--Small in size--Great destruction of them that has taken place--Lake-head Hill thus devastated--Classification of the remains--1. The dolmen, an ossuary--2. The kistvaen--Great numbers, all rifled--3. The stone circle--possibly a crematorium--4. The stone row--Astonishing numbers still existing--5. The menhir--In Christian times becomes a cross--Story of S. Cainnech--Dartmoor crosses--Altar tombs--6. Hut circles--All belong to one period--7. The tracklines--8. The pounds--9. The cairns--10. The camps--11. Rude stone bridges, comparatively modern.
As already intimated, the antiquities found on Dartmoor belong almost exclusively to the Prehistoric Period. The few exceptions are the crosses and the blowing-houses. These shall be spoken of in other chapters. In this we will confine ourselves to a general review of the relics left to show how that the moor was occupied by a large population in the early Bronze Period.
Now, although these relics are very numerous, they are none of them megalithic, that is to say, very huge. And this for two reasons. In the first place it is uncertain whether the people occupying the moor ever did erect any huge stones, like the Stonehenge monsters, or the enormous dolmens of Brittany, and above all of the sandstone districts of the Loire.
In the second place, in the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries the great bulk of the churches round Dartmoor were rebuilt, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the manor houses, bartons, and farms were also reconstructed, and then for the first time since the sixth century was granite employed in ecclesiastical and domestic architecture. The builders delighted in selecting huge stones. They employed monoliths for their pillars; each door and window had a single stone on each side as a jamb, and a single stone as a base; two stones above were used for the arch of every door and window. The amount of granite of a large size carried away from the moor is really prodigious, and no large monument was likely to have been spared.
Then came the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when granite was in demand for gateposts, and every standing stone serviceable was ruthlessly carried away. Almost every circle of upright stones has lost some of its finest blocks in this way, and all that is left to show where they were is the hole cut in the "calm" from which they were extracted, and the _spalls_ or chips made by the quarrymen as they knocked the block into shape. At Sherberton was a fine circle: the three largest stones have been employed a few yards off as gateposts, and two others have been cast down.