Knock at a Venture

Where the sylvan character of the scene changes; where fields give place to hanging woods and they in their turn thin to poverty and obliquity under eternal stress of western winds, a gate, resting by its own weight against a granite post, indicates the limits of agriculture and forestry upon the southern confines of the Moor. Beneath this standpoint Devon’s unnumbered breasts billow to the misty horizon, and dimpling valleys, between the arable lands and higher wealds, are marked by orchards, water meadows and the winding ways of rivers. These, borne aloft, have come from far, and now, with slower current and ampler volume, roam melodiously through pleasant lees, through denes and dingles of sweet flowers, beneath the music of birds and the shadows of great woodlands, to their confluence with the sea. Here, too, lie hamlets and rise crocketed church towers; peat reek sweetens the air; blue doves croon through blue smoke on many a low thatched cot; and life moves in simplicity and apparent peace. The habitations of men glimmer with white-washed walls at fringes of forests, at wind-blown crossways, about small village greens, on lonely roads, by steep hillsides and among sunny combes. Homesteads rise in isolation along the edges of the great central loneliness; whole villages lie in the lap of the hills; and the manifold planes of this spacious scene, whether under flying cloud-shadows or grey rain, midday sunlight or the splendour of summer moons, commingle in one vision, whose particulars only vary to the play of the dawn and sunset lights, to the hands of the roaming elements, to the seasons that bring in turn awakening life and music, high colour-pageants and dying pomps, ultimate sobrieties and snows.

Beyond the gate to the Moor rises a steep road of broken granite and flint. It climbs upward, straight and dogged, into the world of the heather and, pursued a little, reveals the solemn sweep and dip of the circumambient waste. To the skyline tumbles this billowy ocean, and the ripples upon the crest of each mighty wave are granite. Here rise the tors, adorned at this August season with purple ling to their footstools of stone; here subtend wildernesses between the high hills; and the sheep bells jangle upon them, and the red kine bellow from the watercourses. A rook, his feathers blown awry, hops thrice, then ascends heavily; but the kestrel, with greater distinction of flight, glides away from his perch upon a stone, ere he swoops aloft with long reaches, to hang motionless in the air, like a brown star afar off. The moorland world extends in vast, undulating mosaic of olive and dun, thinly veiled by the bloom of the ling and splashed with golden furze and grey granite. The expanse is touched to umber and velvet warmth in sunshine; is enriched with the pure, cool purple of cloud-shadows; is brightened into sheer emerald-green, where springs burst from their peat-moss cradles amid seeding cotton-grass; is lightened throughout its sombre heath tones with glistening sheets of polished fern, where the tracts of the bracken stand under direct sunlight. There is warmth of colour in its breezy interspaces—warmth, won from the ruddiness of ripe rush-heads and manifold grasses all bending and swaying in waves under the wind.

At the junction of two roads, that cross at right angles within a hundred yards of the moor-gate, there stands a blackthorn of venerable shape. It is a deformed, grotesque tree, much bent and shrivelled. Its boughs are coated with close fabric of grey encrustations, but such clothing has failed to protect its carcase against a century of winters and biting winds. In autumn the scanty foliage is still brightened by a meagre crop of fruit; but life crawls with difficulty up the zigzag bones of this most ancient thorn, while each spring its tardy sap awakes less of the tree, and leaves increasing concourse of abrupt and withered twigs to rot above and below the centre of vitality. Beneath this ruin you shall note a slight hillock of green grass, where foxgloves shake aloft their purple pyramids of blossom and a rabbit’s hole lies close beside them. Of artificial barrow or modern burying-place there is no suggestion here; and yet this mound by the highway side conceals a grave; and the story of the human dust within it is the truth concerning one who lived and smarted more than a hundred years ago. Men were of the same pattern then as now, but manners varied vastly; and the Moor-man, who farms upon the grudging boundaries of that great central desert to-day, and curses the winds that scatter his beggarly newtakes with thistledown and fern seed, might wonder at the tales this same wild wind could tell him of past times and of the customs of his ancestors.