Tavistock still retains many remains of its once mighty abbey. The town, situated as it is in a picturesque valley through which the beautiful Tavy rushes, crystal clear, from the moors, is one of the most attractive in all Devon. It is the finest centre for exploring the western part of Dartmoor, for the moorland creeps down to within a short walking distance of the town itself.
Fine fishing may be had in the neighbouring streams, there is a good golf course, and the country all around abounds in objects of great natural beauty and historic interest.
Exeter, the cathedral city which was the scene of Ordulph's Samson-like feat, is thirty-three miles away by a road that crosses the very heart of Dartmoor, a wild, beautiful highway that rises in places to well over 1,200 feet; and sixteen-and-a-half miles to the south is Plymouth, from which Tavistock is easily reached by train.
There are few places in the West Country more attractive than this old town in the moors, so richly endowed by time and by nature.
Running across the southern part of the heart of wild Dartmoor is a very ancient road. "The Abbot's Way" they call it, and antiquaries hold varied opinions as to when it was made, and even as to where it led to and from. To-day, much of this old trackway has gone back to nature and cannot be distinguished from the rugged moorland across which it passes, but some stretches of it survive in a strange green path marked here and there by a boundary stone or a much-weathered Celtic cross.
But the old stories--tales perhaps even older than the road--tell that the Abbot's Way is the favourite hunting ground of the Wish Hounds or Yell Hounds, an eerie spectre-pack that hunts across the wildest parts of the moor on moonless nights.
Strange, gruesome tales are told by those who, benighted or lost in the fog, have stumbled home through the dark of a winter night across the grim moorland. They tell--half dazed with fear--as they reach at last some house and welcome human companionship, of the wild baying of the hounds that drifted through the murk night to their ears, or of the sudden vision of the pack passing at whirlwind speed across bog and marsh urged onward by a grim black figure astride a giant dark horse from whose smoking nostrils came flame and fire.