404 
JOUKNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
The general appearance of this church internally is not cheerful, 
every part (walls, roofs, arches, pillars) being covered with white- 
wash. Everything indicates how industrious the whitewashing 
contractor has been. Nothing excepting the actual glazing seems 
to have escaped his assiduous attention. There is only one apology 
for whitewash in these exposed churches. In the course of ages, 
perhaps centuries, it forms a kind of battening or enamelled crust 
to the walls, and hides the damp to some extent. For you must 
know that damp is a characteristic of these churches. At one 
of them I said to the sexton, " You have a good church here, 
I see." "The church be good enough, I dare say," he replied, 
" but it be oracommon damp ; " and my observations led me to the 
conclusion, I am bound to say, that these buildings are mostly 
" uncommon damp." 
The exterior of this little church of St. Mary is charmingly 
picturesque. Situated on rising ground, the plain but well-propor- 
tioned tower seen above the noble elms in the churchyard, the 
perpendicular tracery, south porch, and time-tinted walls, disclosed 
behind the branches, and a venerable granite cross at the foot of 
the churchyard, just outside the gate. On one of the tombstones 
is an inscription which is both laconic and original — 
" Heare is, in memorandum, of Mary, wife of Eoger Glanville, 
interred April the 19th, 1708." 
On the road to Oakhampton from Tavistock, and about five miles 
from the former town, stands the little moorland church of Sourton, 
dedicated to St. Thomas a Beckett. Its situation on the elevated 
and barren and treeless down, with no houses near it except a small 
wayside inn, is more bleak and isolated than any of these Dartmoor 
churches, Brent Tor excepted, and was much more romantic a year 
or two ago than it is now ; but the new railway from Oakhampton 
to Lidford, passing just under the venerable building, and forming 
an ugly cutting and bank close to the churchyard, destroys not 
a little of the poetry of the scene. It is pleasant — at any rate, it is 
to me — now and then to live in the past and to forget the present ; 
but this cannot be done even in an old Moorland church, if a steam 
engine happens to be puffing and blowing immediately outside. It 
mocks your antiquarian wanderings, and assures you in the most 
unmistakable and emphatic tones that this is the nineteenth, and 
not the thirteenth, century. 
After waiting some time for the key, I was at last informed that 
