50 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



the rude granite enclosure of 500 feet in diameter, encircled by 

 a wall of granite blocks some ten feet in thickness, but nowhere 

 more than six feet high ! Could any other natural feature so 

 powerfully evoke the ghost of a long-buried Past as this 

 heathery moorland? Twenty-five hut-circles, also composed 

 of rough granite blocks, are far more easily traced than are the 

 remains of the Yorkshire pit-villages, and the spring of water 

 from which their ancient inhabitants drank yet runs within the 

 enclosure, so changeless is Nature when left to herself. Over- 

 grown with ferns and heath, the place is much as it must have 

 appeared a year after the Romans or invading Saxons drove 

 out its natives. Archaeology asks in vain whether the name 

 Grimspound is connected with a "boundary" (as in the many 

 Grim's dykes of other parts of England), or, in view of the 

 many dark superstitions of Dartmoor, whether it has aught to 

 do with Grima, said to be a Saxon name for the Evil One; or, 

 lastly, whether Grym, the fisherman and eponymus of Grimsby, 

 left here also traces of his presence. It must belong to Keltic 

 times, however, if it may be regarded as part of the group of 

 river and place names of this district ; Dart, Teign, Taw, and 

 the many compounds of Tor, itself connected with the Hebrew 

 for "rock" and "passing with an early migration westward" 

 from Tyre to these Dartmoor Tors.* Every stone before us, 

 therefore, may well carry thought backwards to these Phoeni- 

 cian traders who, while buying the Cornish tin, left the San- 

 skrit name for it Kastira on the Cassiterides or Tin Islands, 

 and perhaps on Cassiter Street, Bodmin. To find another 

 link with that remote past, the very faith which now gives 

 England its national pre-eminence may have been handed 

 down to us by the men who once trampled this heather, and 

 have long turned to dust under it. Amid these deeper medi- 

 tations on the stone monuments of the moor, the wayfarer re- 

 gains the ancient trackway below and makes for Two Bridges 

 * Earle, Philology of the English Tongue, p. 3. 



