Tenements there must be, but they should be in the sheltered valleys, and the wide hillsides and sweeps of moor should be left severely alone. As it is, encroachments have gone on unchecked, rather have been encouraged. Every parish in Devon has a right to send cattle to the moor, excepting only Barnstaple and Totnes. But the Duchy, by allowing and favouring inclosures, is able to turn common land into private property, and that it is only too willing to do.
Happily there now exists a Dartmoor Preservation Society, which is ready to contest every attempt made in this direction. But it can do very little to protect the commons around the forest--in fact it can do nothing, if the freeholders in the parishes that enjoy common rights agree together to appropriate the land to themselves--and for the poor labourer who is able to buy himself a cow it can do nothing at all, for his rights have no legal force.
[2] The Welsh _twr_ is a tower; _twrr_, a heap or pile. From the same root as the Latin _turris_.
[4] HARDWICKE'S _Science Gossip_, 1871, p. 123.
Abundance of remains of primeval inhabitants--No trace of Briton or Saxon on Dartmoor--None of Palæolithic man--The Neolithic man who occupied it--Account of his migrations--His presence in Ireland, in China, in Algeria--A pastoral people--The pottery--The arrival of the Celt in Britain in two waves--The Gael--The Briton--Introduction of iron--Mode of life of the original occupants of the moor--The huts--Pounds--Cooking--Tracklines--Enormous numbers who lived on Dartmoor--A peaceable people.
Probably no other tract of land of the same extent in England contains such numerous and well-preserved remains of prehistoric antiquity as Dartmoor.
The curious feature about them is that they all belong to one period, that of the Early Bronze, when flint was used abundantly, but metal was known, and bronze was costly and valued as gold is now.
Not a trace has been found so far of the peoples who intervened between these primitive occupants and the mediæval tin-miners.
If iron was introduced a couple of centuries before the Christian era, how is it that the British inhabitants who used iron and had it in abundance have left no mark of their occupancy of Dartmoor? It can be accounted for only on the supposition that they did not value it. The woods had been thinned and they preferred the lowlands, whereas in the earlier period the dense forests that clothed the country were too close a jungle and too much infested by wolves to be suitable for the habitation of a pastoral people.