heir
handiwork quickly returns to primitive waste; fern and furze hide the
robbed cairn and bury the shattered cross; flood and lightning and
tempest roam over the darkness of a region sacred to them, and man
stretches his hand for what Nature touches not; but the menhir yet
stands erect, the "sacred" circles are circles still, and these, with
like records of a dim past, present to thinking travellers the crown and
first glory of the Moor. Integral portions of the ambient desolation are
they--rude toys that infant humanity has left in Mother Nature's lap;
and the spectacle of them twines a golden thread of human interest into
the fabric of each lonely heath, each storm-scarred mountain-top and
heron-haunted stream. Nothing is changed since skin-clad soldiers and
shepherds strode these wastes, felt their hearts quicken at sight of
women, or their hands clench over celt-headed spears before danger. Here
the babies of the stone-folk, as the boys and girls to-day, stained
their little mouths and ringers with fruit of briar and whortle; the
ling bloomed then as now; the cotton-grass danced its tattered plume;
the sphagnum mosses opened emerald-green eyes in marsh and quaking bog;
and hoary granite scattered every ravine and desert valley. About those
aboriginal men the Moor spread forth the same horizon of solemn
enfolding hills, and where twinkle the red hides of the moor-man's
heifers through upstanding fern, in sunny coombs and hawthorn thickets,
yesterday the stone-man's cattle roamed and the little eyes of a hidden
bear followed their motions. Here, indeed, the first that came in the
flesh are the last to vanish in their memorials; here Nature, to whom
the hut-circle of granite, all clad in Time's lichen livery of gold and
grey, is no older than the mushroom ring shining like a necklace of
pearls within it--Nature may follow what course she will, may build as
she pleases, may probe to the heart of things, may pursue the eternal
Law without let from the pigmies; and here, if anywhere from man's
precarious standpoint, shall he perceive the immutable and observe a
presentment of himself in those ephemera that dance above the burn at
dawn, and ere twilight passes gather up their gauze wings and perish.

According to individual temperament this pregnant region attracts and
fascinates the human spectator or repels him. Martin Grimbal loved
Dartmoor and, apart from ties of birth and early memories, his natural
predilections fo