There is not much of great interest in the neighbourhood of Crediton. Perhaps the church that most deserves a visit is Colebrook, with its curious wood carving and a fine original and late piece of screen-work. There is also Coplestone Cross, a very remarkable piece of early Celtic interlaced work, such as is not to be found elsewhere in England except in Northumbria. It is mentioned in a charter in 974, but it is far older than that. It stands at the junction of three parishes, and has given a name to a once noted family in the county, that comes into an old local rhyme, which runs:--
"Crocker, Cruwys, and Coplestone, When the Conqueror came were found at home."
But who the ancestors of these families were at the time of the Conquest we have no means of knowing. Of the few English thegns who retained their lands in Devonshire after the Conquest, not one is recorded as holding any of the estates that later belonged to these families. The cross is of granite, and stands 10 feet 6 inches high. It is, unhappily, mutilated at the top.
At Nymet Rowland, near Crediton, the savages lived, to whom Mr. Greenwood drew attention. They were dispersed by becoming a prey to typhoid, when their hovel was torn down. The last of them, an old man, lived the rest of his life and died in the parish of Whitstone in a cask littered with straw, the cask chained to a post in an outhouse. I have given an account of them in my _Old English Home_.
At Lapford is a fine screen, and the carved benches are deserving of attention. Lapford was for long, too long, the place over which "Pass'n Radford" brooded as an evil genius. I have told several stories of him in my _Old Country Life_, under the name of Hannaford. He has been sketched in Mr. Blackmore's _Maid of Sker_ beside Parson Froude, of Knowstone. The latter has been drawn without excessive exaggeration.
At Down S. Mary the screen has been admirably completed from a fragment by the village carpenter. There is a good screen at Bow.
A good walk through pretty scenery to Dowrish, an ancient mansion, and once dating from King John's reign, but modernised in suburban villa style. Though there is nothing remaining of interest in the house, the view thence, stretching across the richly wooded land of the new red sandstone to the heights of Dartmoor, will repay the walk. For many years Crediton was the residence of the Rev. Samuel Rowe, the Columbus of Dartmoor. He laboriously explored that region, till then almost unvisited, and chronicled its prehistoric relics. Although he was hopelessly involved in the pseudo-antiquarianism of his period, and put everything prehistoric down to the Druids and Phœnicians, yet his researches were most valuable, and he has recorded the existence of many relics that have since disappeared. His _Perambulation of Dartmoor_ was published in 1848. He had indeed been preceded in 1832 by the Rev. Edward A. Bray, vicar of Tavistock, but the visits of the latter to Dartmoor had been confined to the immediate neighbourhood of the town of which he was parson.