398 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
NOTES ON SOME MOORLAND AND BORDER CHURCHES 
IN DEVON. 
Mil. JAMES HINE'S PAPEE. 
(Read March 20th, 1873.) 
The purpose of this paper is to bring before the notice of the 
Society some of the architectural features of a few of the most 
secluded of Devonshire churches — the Moorland churches, or 
churches situated near the Moor. In this railway age, when the 
prosaic iron road goes within a very few miles of almost any place, 
none of these churches are very out-of-the-way, or difficult to get 
at ; but they are seldom visited by strangers, or indeed by the 
inhabitants of our own large towns. Murray and Black pass 
them by with the briefest description ; and in the county works 
of Polwhele, Lysons, and others, they are scarcely more fully 
noticed. Yet they possess a local interest certainly, and an interest, 
I also think, of a wider kind. That such a wild and bleak district, 
with so few inhabitants (situated, as at Brent Tor, " all alone," as 
Risdon says, or as at Sourton, with only two or three cottages hard 
by), should possess any churches at all, is in itself an interesting 
fact — one that points, I think, to the completeness of a system 
which planted a church in every district, which, not content to 
make provision for the ninety and nine in the wilderness of towns 
and villages, sought the one lost sheep on the mountain tor, and 
provided a pen for it in its furthest wanderings. 
These weather-beaten, unsheltered little churches are interesting, 
too, from the fact that, after being exposed to every wind of heaven 
for four, five, or even six centuries, they are still standing with 
very much the same external form which they presented when 
first built. In their construction, and architecture also, they are 
not devoid of interest. Built of the hardest and least workable 
material, they yet possess, with some few peculiarities, the same 
characteristics in mouldings and other details which distinguish 
the most elaborate contemporary churches in other parts of the 
