I was agreeably surprised to find among the copper plates several of my old acquaintances, which I lately degraded to no better rank than boundaries of parishes, or unmeaning heaps of stones; but for the future, I shall esteem them as the sacred relics of the worship of our ancestors.
Thomas Pennant to William Borlase, 15 June 17541
TRAVELLING WEST ALONG the B3212 from the edge of the moor in the direction of Princetown, it is good to stop at Postbridge. A cyclist destined for the hostel at Bellever will already have struggled up onto the moorland road from Exeter. Conquered first was the long winding tree-canopied climb to Moretonhampstead, the Bridford and Woodcock Woods hugging the road tightly, the town marked on the way in by sombre almshouses and on the way out by a mechanic’s workshop. Beyond, the ups and the downs are gentler, maintaining altitude, before the culminating climb to Shapley Common is signalled by the rattle over a cattle grid, a sharp right and the shock of a sudden steep hill. In a panting moment the stone wall marking the boundary between the newtakes – small enclosures of common land – and Dartmoor’s great central waste is passed. At the hill’s first summit, some 400 metres above sea level and beyond enclosed land, the cyclist emerges from tree, hedge and wall-lined roads into a massive landscape.
The road swoops on undulating for three miles until reaching the Warren House Inn, Dartmoor’s highest pub. The sudden descent into the wide depression of the East Dart river valley sees the bicycle’s spendthrift wheels squander a hundred metres in not many more seconds. Rapidly tracking, the landscape becomes more domestic, the road again treeand hedge-lined and fenced, the land behind enclosed, dotted with houses, Bed and Breakfasts and a pub or two. But this is not lowland pastoral but upland plantation country. On the Ordnance Survey map the newtakes are only a narrow strip along the road’s edge marked in white, contrasting with the green of the plantations and the much more expansive yellow of the moorland beyond. The conifer mass of Soussons Down hunkers to the south, the green-dark shadow of the Bellever plantation rises ahead, and the map tells of the great Fernworthy plantation and reservoir beyond Stannon Tour to the north.
Postbridge, cool and sheltered, is an oasis. It has a car park (motorists are asked to voluntarily deposit a pound in a hefty stone collecting box), a national park noticeboard and shop, and a post office/general store with a defunct petrol pump. It takes its name from the medieval clapper bridge that crosses the Dart and lies parallel to the modern road bridge.
Access to the yellow parts of the map is easy from Postbridge. Paths in most directions can be picked up from here or from Higher Cherrybrook Bridge, the other side of the Bellever plantation. The bridleway towards Fernworthy is tempting. Strongly marked on the map by green em dashes, it follows the River Dart for two miles or so. As the Dart chuckles on the left and cows chew watchfully, you push through dense scratchy gorse. Offended sheep haul themselves to their feet, their great woollen rumps bobbing as they lumber up the valley slopes.
Where the East Dart veers to the left, heading west and then north to its head near Cranmere Pool, the path goes straight on, gradually reaching higher, drier, yellower ground, the landscape becoming more like its cartographic representation. To the left – to the west – the landscape now opens up, the waste stretching into the hazy distance; to the right, the plantation and glimpses of enclosed farmland are coming into view. The track’s gradual ascent peaks some sixty metres below Sittaford Tor (538 metres). On this hot and bright day the only sounds are conversation, the thrunch of footfalls, the light wind, flowing water, the incessant song of the larks and meadow pipits, and the humming sawing of insect life. Conversation ebbs, thoughts find a groove, and breathing and step synchronise, overlaying that indistinct but generalised moorland ambience. To be here in the winter, especially in the snow, when there is no birdsong or insect hum, is to know how much quieter it can be.
Near this highest point on the path are the Grey Wethers, two intersecting stone circles. A bracketed addition on the map says they have been ‘restored’ but here, on the ground, no authority has felt the need to erect an explanatory sign. Walking among the stones, they take on the mobility of sculpture and it is difficult to take a photograph that squeezes these stunted stones into a single frame and captures their mystery and precise layout.
The path continues. Wistful backward glances testify to a piqued curiosity.
In the distance Teignhead Farm emerges from the landscape just beyond the North Teign River. Surrounded by open moorland, the stone walls and the mature trees shielding the farm buildings from the wind suggest a defiant exercise in enclosure, setting an example few saw fit to follow. A harder stare reveals that it is abandoned, the OS, confirming that the farm is a ‘ruin’, once again determining what is seen. Established in 1780, it was an extreme example of late-eighteenth-century attempts to ‘improve’ Dartmoor and led to the enclosure by drystone walls of 1,551 acres of open moorland. So vast was the undertaking that these walls now provide the walker with an excellent way of orientating herself. The farm was requisitioned by the War Office in 1943 when the military extended its use of the moor and has lain derelict ever since. Its crumbling walls, Eric Hemery predicted in 1983, ‘will soon go “back-to-moor”’.2
Fernworthy plantation lies on a north-west axis and bulges towards the track, which now takes a sudden right directly into the muffling atmosphere of woods. This is a different kind of environment. Stacked logs, deep tyre tracks in dried mud, well worn stony roads, tags marking the trees: it is carefully managed, one of the Forestry Commission’s extensive Dartmoor interests and responsibilities. At a clearing in the plantation there is another stone circle. It is just there, a circle of granite stones, once out on open moorland, now surrounded by conifers, the decision not to plant in this space the only indication of its significance. Again, it is hard to photograph effectively; foregrounding the stones distances the conifers, exaggerating the size of both.
At the reservoir, itself three-quarters encircled by the plantation, there are a number of options. From Gidleigh Park, roads can be picked up that lead into the densely plotted lanes fanning out from the ever-fashionable village of Chagford, but for walkers tied to their cars the best option is the Hurston Ridge cutting directly south back to the road. Quickening the step is the promise of the Warren House Inn at its terminus, which overlooks the old commercial rabbit warrens that shape the land falling gently away to the south towards the Soussons Down plantation. From here, fortified, the pleasant twilit amble back down the hill into Postbridge completes the circle.
That evening the day’s curiosities can be followed up. It was not the disused farm, the plantations or the old warrens, barely discernible to the unpractised eye, which stayed in the mind, but the stone circles, one out on the moor, the other among conifers. Samuel Rowe’s A Perambulation of the Antient & Royal Forest of Dartmoor comes to hand. The rare first edition (1848) can be downloaded, printed and bulldog-clipped together. The Perambulation opens with a reproduction of a painting of the ‘Borders of Dartmoor, Scene on the Taw’, a spot in the far north of the moor just south of Belstone, a dramatically located ancient village. In the background of the picture dark and sombre mountains rise, reaching pointy peaks; in the mid-ground, cattle graze on the plain through which the Taw flows north: the contrast between the high moors and the lowlands is very sharp. In the foreground lie large flat boulders and on one is a pair of day trippers, one lounging, one decorously perched.
A page on and the frontspiece identifies the author as the vicar of Crediton, a little town near Exeter, and the publishers as J. B. Rowe of Whimple Street, Plymouth and Hamilton, Adams and Co. of London. Dominating the page is a lithograph titled ‘Drewsteignton Cromlech’. In the foreground a simple stone structure composed of three upright stones topped by a large flat stone; in the background a mountainous scene. Turning to the index, references to the Fernworthy Circle and the Grey Wethers are easily found, and the reader is quickly plunged into the middle of an obscure discussion of temples, sacred circles and ‘the struggle between ophiolatry and solar worship’. The Grey Wethers, Rowe says, is the largest such circle in Devonshire. So affecting is their mysterious power, he imagined them inspiring the work of a great poet. He cites a passage from Keats’s Hyperion describing a group of overthrown Titans:
One here, one there,
Lay, vast and edgeways, like a dismal cirque,
Of Druid stones, upon a forlorn moor
When the chill rain begins at shut of eve
In dull November.3
Rowe’s discussion also mentions a via sacra, ‘a processional road of Druidical worship, according to the Arkite ceremonial’, and refers to the ‘great Sacred Circle’ on Scorhill Down. Of this Rowe writes that it is ‘by far the finest example of the rude but venerable shrines of Druidical worship in Devonshire’, adding that it ‘may successfully dispute the palm’ with better-known circles, such as those at Castle Rigg near Keswick and at Rollright in Oxfordshire. The ‘rugged angular appearance of the massive stones’ that form this ‘rude hypaethral temple’, he suggests, can be contrasted with the ‘squarer … more truncated’ stones of the Grey Wethers.4
Scorhill Down is just a mile or two north of the Fernworthy plantation, a short distance from Gidleigh Park. Once the meandering country lanes that skirt the North Teign have been negotiated, it is easily accessible from a small car park. West and south-west of this point there is no road for, respectively, thirteen and eighteen kilometres. The ‘sacred circle’ is just a short walk down a grassy granite-strewn trackway.
WHEN PUBLISHED IN 1848, Samuel Rowe’s Perambulation was the most ambitious book ever written about Dartmoor. Announcing itself as a ‘topographical survey’ of Dartmoor’s ‘antiquities and scenery’, it also boasted ‘notices’ relating to natural history, climate and, tellingly, Dartmoor’s ‘agricultural capabilities’. Shaped into two long sections, the first and shorter of the two consisted of thematic discussions. These provided a physical description of the moor, an outline of the historical roots of its various systems of landholding and rights, an account of its ‘aboriginal inhabitants’ and their religious practices and, finally, a long section, some two thirds of the total, on Dartmoor’s ‘monumental relics’. Having read these sixty pages of preparatory material, the conscientious reader would be properly equipped to accompany Rowe as he set off across the moor, describing his perambulations and elaborating on his themes as prompted by the points of interest encountered.
Rowe was not the first to so structure his account of the moor, but his became the paradigmatic example of a genre of Dartmoor writing that made the subject – the landscape itself – manageable by approaching it this way. Walks allowed Dartmoor to be treated as a series of narrative poems that flowed allusively over the moor’s surface but required annotation and commentary. The reader might take impressionistic pleasure in the ‘poem’, but its full meaning could only be grasped when accompanied by skilled topographical, antiquarian and historical commentary.
Rowe explained that the moor should interest the geologist, who could make a study of its tors; the botanist, whose curiosity would be particularly roused by Wistman’s Wood; and the antiquary, who could hardly miss the importance of the ‘aboriginal circumvallation’ of Grimspound.5 If landscapes like Dartmoor were now the province of a wide range of specialists, Rowe’s book announced itself as a pioneering attempt by a clerical amateur to draw this multidisciplinary knowledge into a coherent whole. Rowe’s readers were united – or so he implied – by their developed sensibility to the aesthetics of landscape. The ‘Devonshire Highlands’, he asserted, provided ‘scenes of unexpected loveliness and grandeur’ which rivalled the ‘far-famed scenery of North Wales’.6
Rowe recognised that north Wales, like the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands and continental landscapes such as the Alps and the French campagne, were long established as landscapes that could satisfy Romantic sensibilities. The development of these tastes has been traced to the great shifts that occurred in the social, political and cultural life of Europe during the eighteenth century. Early modernity, experienced through new forms of production (agricultural enclosure and early industrialisation) and the new forms of urbanised life that flowed from this, stimulated new attitudes towards the landscape. The gradual shift in aesthetic taste saw the popularity of the formal garden fall and enthusiasm for places thought less affected by human intervention rise. Much was paradoxical, not least the readiness of the owners of Britain’s great gardens to dedicate great resources to manufacturing a fashionable illusion of naturalness.7 The new cultural value attached to nature evolved into a taste for wild places in all their apparently untamed variety. Dartmoor, Rowe understood, could be promoted as a desirable commodity.
Rowe had to convince a discerning consumer. Since the late eighteenth century an ability to appreciate landscape had become de rigueur for the cultured members of the new middle classes. William Gilpin’s influential essays of 1792 on the picturesque taught his readers to appreciate the English landscape as they would a painting. Being able to distinguish one picturesque view from another, explaining its strengths and weaknesses, became an important new source of cultural capital. Cultures of competency like this allowed possessors of new sorts of wealth, accumulated through manufacturing, commerce and the professions, to both emulate the disinterested exercise of taste manifested in the gardens of the gentry and the aristocracy and to challenge outright aristocratic dictation in questions of taste. Subjecting the landscaped garden to aesthetic judgement was an assertion of cultural authority over privately owned land, while celebrating ‘natural’ landscapes, in the context of enclosure, brought into question the degree to which the gentry and aristocracy could be trusted to preserve the nation’s landscape heritage.8 Though the search for the picturesque as a craze was short-lived, it bequeathed the English a set of pre-industrial rustic ideals that long continued to constitute what the urban middle class thought was best about rural England.
When ideas of the picturesque coalesced with Romantic notions of sensibility particular landscapes became celebrated for the feelings and sensations they evoked. New ideas about beauty further brought into question established aesthetic standards. Edmund Burke’s essay on the sublime (1757), little noticed when first published but eventually of great influence, described the ‘delight’ we experience when we have before us ‘an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances’.9 Certain kinds of terrain came to be considered sublime, particularly mountainous regions, their apparent resistance to domestication revealing the awesome power of nature. As the cult of nature generated a cult of the sublime, so landscapes were celebrated that were aesthetically quite distinct from those admired in terms of the rustic ideals of the picturesque. If a landscape could be celebrated because it was ‘awful’, the unproductive terrain of Dartmoor, brought to the attention of the Romantic, became a landscape of desire.
Symptomatic of this landscape thinking was a competitive regionalism, and Rowe was keen to establish Dartmoor as a Romantic landscape equal to the best. Rowe quoted non-Devonian observers who could be relied upon for their objectivity, like the Scottish journalist who admitted that when ‘wandering’ Dartmoor he ‘often forgot’ he was not holidaying ‘among the blue bonnets of Auld Scotland’. High praise indeed. Or William Howitt, who in his Rural Life of England (1838) found in Dartmoor evidence of the sublime: ‘If you want sternness and loneliness, you may pass into Dartmoor. There are wastes and wilds, crags of granite, views into far off districts, and the sounds of waters hurrying away over their rocky beds, enough to satisfy the largest hungering and thirsting after poetical delight.’10 Howitt described the ‘melancholy music’ of a ‘deep dark river’, and ‘gnarled oaks’ overlooked by ‘glowing ruddy tors standing in the blue air in their sublime silence’, but the key words or ideas to hold in the mind are ‘want’, ‘satisfy’, ‘hungering’ and ‘thirsting’: Howitt was introducing Dartmoor to a readership craving Romantic sensation.
The extract concluded: ‘one sole woodlark from the far ascending forest on the right filled the wide solitude with his wild autumnal note. At that moment I reached an eminence, and at once saw the dark crags of Dartmoor high aloft before me.’11 This is romantic Dartmoor, always out of reach, a site of infinite regression, each eminence leading ineluctably to another. Coming close to the moor flooded the visitor with desire, but ineffable nature, reached for through exultant prose and poetry, imminent but never grasped, could only expose her to the agony of non-consummation.
Rowe’s promotional romanticism was wedded to a more prosaic purpose. The moor needed to be preserved against the ravages of industrial modernity: ‘But this rocky citadel is no longer secure. Quarries are opened on the heights of Dartmoor – powder-mills are projects in the very heart of its solitudes – cultivation is smiting its corners – steam is marshalling his chariots of iron and coursers of fire, panting to penetrate its fastnesses – and the most interesting vestiges of antiquity are in hourly danger of destruction.’12 Howitt’s inaccessible Dartmoor was proving penetrable. The conditions exercising his Romantic desires were threatened by quarrying, milling and the railway. Even new systems of cultivation wrought a metallic violence on the moor. Not merely subject to the benign interest of learned specialists, Dartmoor now inspired entrepreneurs keen to exploit its natural resources. It was thus necessary to record the evidence being lost to ‘multiplied population, increasing commercial speculation, and economic improvements’. Rowe hoped his book, by bringing the antiquarian riches of Dartmoor to national attention, might help mobilise action against the ‘impending assaults of the mason’s hammer, and the excavator’s pick’, saving what ought to be of ‘interest in the history of this country and of mankind’. This, an early expression of Dartmoor preservationism, is the subject of a later chapter. First, though, we must understand what it was that Rowe thought should be preserved, and it is here that his thematic discussions, particularly those concerned with Dartmoor’s ‘sacred’ relics, are most important. They will take us back to the eighteenth century and another source of interest in wild places.
Rowe’s survey of Dartmoor’s ‘monumental relics’ began with the ‘circular temple, or sacred circle’, the most ‘conspicuous’ of Dartmoor’s ‘Druidical antiquities’. Although admitting that nothing on Dartmoor approached the ‘massive proportions’ of Stonehenge, Rowe thought Dartmoor’s relics were more interesting on account of their greater antiquity. This was evident in their ‘rude simplicity’, which he contrasted with the ‘artificial trilithons’ of Salisbury Plain. Stonehenge, famous for a century, is thus diminished because it was a work of skilful derivation rather than unselfconscious expression. He continued in this vein, drawing attention to Dartmoor’s stone avenues or parallellitha, arguing that though neglected by previous writers, they had played an important role in Druidical ritual. ‘Rock idols’, logan stones and rock basins also attracted his attention. Had the aboriginal people of Dartmoor worshipped or idolised Dartmoor’s more striking rock formations? What role had logan stones, remarkable structures in which one stone rested precariously on another, played in those same rituals? Though no logan stones remained intact in 1848, legend had it that a single man, exerting maximum force, could not move the balanced stone, but it would ‘rock’ or ‘vibrate’ at the lightest touch. What role was assigned to the basins, sometimes several feet wide and deep, found in the rocks, particularly on prominent tors? Continuing to classify, Rowe listed kistvaens (stone tomb-like structures laid on the surface of the moor), cairns (burial sites formed from large piles of broken stone), barrows or tumuli (earthen burial grounds) and rock pillars or ‘rude Stone Obelisks’ (long narrow stones placed upright, perhaps of some memorial or ritual purpose). He also identified the remains of stone huts, as evident in the surviving small circles of stones that he thought had once been built up into walls with a roof, and pounds, or circumvallations, large stone enclosures often containing within them evidence of stone structures. Ancient trackways, roads, track lines, boundary banks, bridges, forts and entrenchments also got a look in. Most remarkable of all was the cromlech at Drewsteignton.13
Rowe’s impressively learned and erudite text had begun life as a rather plain lecture of 1830 cataloguing Dartmoor’s Druidical antiquities delivered to the Plymouth Institution. This worthy institution, typical of early-nineteenth-century middle-class associational culture, was dedicated to ‘the promotion of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, in the town and neighbourhood’.14 Rowe drew on the work of contemporaries like Sir R. Colt Hoare (1758–1838), famous for his research on the antiquities of Wiltshire, but he was most influenced by the antiquarian writings of William Borlase and Richard Polwhele, two West Country clergymen. Polwhele (1760–1838), a Cornish clergyman who later became vicar of the east Devon parish of Kenton, was the author of Historical Views of Devonshire in Five Volumes (1793) – only the first volume was completed – and The History of Devonshire (1797), as well as comparable works on Cornwall and many published sermons and poems. His work on Devon paid particular attention to Dartmoor. Borlase (1686–1772) had been active during the heady days of mid-eighteenth-century antiquarian debate. A correspondent of William Stukeley, who brought Wiltshire’s Stonehenge and Avebury to national attention, Borlase was one of the leading antiquarians of his time. Though he did not write directly about Dartmoor, his work on Cornwall was profoundly influential, inspiring later writers who believed the ancient history of Devon and Cornwall – the region known as Dumnonia in the Roman sources – was distinct from the rest of Britain.
As Rowe set out on his perambulations, obsessively noting down Dartmoor’s antiquarian and topographical features, he encountered a moor that had been given meaning by these earlier antiquarians. The relics he discovered during his perambulations, often listing them for the first time in print, were used to elaborate a set of contentious theories that had been in circulation for the best part of a century.
Though antiquarian enthusiasm proved infectious in late eighteenth-century Britain, it was not universally admired. Then, as now, the antiquarian was thought obsessively and eccentrically preoccupied with the collection of obscure detail, a harmless pursuit that gave insufficiently busy clergymen in isolated parishes something to do.15 Eighteenth-century historians, tasked to produce eloquent discourses on the lessons to be learned from the study of Graeco-Roman classical civilisation, were particularly contemptuous. David Hume, for instance, thought it ‘rather fortunate’ that the barbarian prehistory that provoked the curiosity of the antiquarians was ‘buried in silence and oblivion’. What possible benefit could be gleaned from the study of the primitive?16
High-handed dismissals like this gradually became less plausible as antiquarianism’s challenge to early eighteenth-century notions of what were the proper objects of historical study came to resonate with wider shifts in public opinion. Antiquarians asserted with greater confidence the virtue of national self-knowledge, promoting their work in nationalist terms, a sentiment that intensified during the Napoleonic Wars.17 Research into prehistory provided increasingly celebratory accounts of an indigenous ancient British culture, apparently ‘free of the mannered artificiality and corrupt lifestyle’ of late-eighteenth century life.18 Such enthusiasm was reinforced by the fashionable primitivism of the time, most often associated with the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With the primitive conceived as innocent and uncorrupted, as distinct from the barbarian, so the notion of civilisation itself came under scrutiny. Most obviously influential was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon’s monumental historical study published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. Gibbon argued that great civilisations declined when they lost contact with their foundational principles and became decadent and ill disciplined. To be ignorant of a nation’s history was to be blind to what made it great and might, given continued vigilance, ensure that it remained so.
When iconic poems celebrating British resistance to Roman tyranny, like William Mason’s ‘Caractacus’ (1759) and William Cowper’s ‘Boadicea’ (1782), were added to the mix, ancient Britain could be embraced as an authentic and heroic component of the national story.19 The poets made the ancient Britons defenders of liberty, a people who hung on to their own traditions until, crucially, their conversion to Christianity. Then ‘spiritually and with commendable docility’ they ‘surrendered to the teachings of Christ’.20 In this way, the British never were slaves, for they resisted Roman hegemony through the maintenance of their customary practices. The ancient Britons could be celebrated for their patriotic rectitude rather than scorned for their prehistoric barbarity.
These patriotic interpretations chimed with the emergence of stadial theories of human development, according to which each civilisation was thought to advance through a series of recognisable steps. Prompted by imperial encounters with the non-European colonised ‘other’, one strain of thought suggested that these peoples were not irredeemably barbarian, primitive or savage, but at an early stage in the development of their civilisations. If the development of all peoples followed a similar pattern, as this nascent comparative anthropology seemed to suggest, then an understanding of primitive peoples in the present could help the antiquarian decode the meanings of the material survivals of Britain’s own primitive past.21
None of this was uncontentious. Mid-eighteenth-century antiquarian debates were animated by disputes concerning the religious practices of the ancient Britons and the degree to which continuities could be claimed between pre-Christian and Christian practices. Dartmoor’s tremendous prehistoric riches – those ‘monumental relics’ catalogued by Samuel Rowe a century later – made it an important focus for antiquarian discussion. Was this landscape the preserve of a British heritage that testified to the great continuity of a distinctive British civilisation? Might those relics even be seen as proto-Protestant? Or did these relics signify a more alien British past that was barbaric, perhaps Celtic, and possibly akin to Roman Catholicism? Who were the people who had built those stone circles? Where did they come from? What did they believe? Could the free-born Briton claim them as ancestors?
WILLIAM BORLASE WAS born on 2 February 1696 at Pendeen House in the parish of St Just. His family were second-rank Cornish gentry, just the type of people who expected to hold positions of local responsibility or to make their way in the professions. Borlase’s father had been educated at Exeter College, Oxford and married the daughter of a respectable Devonshire family. Borlase followed his father to Exeter in 1713, receiving his BA in 1716 and his MA in 1719. In a period when many Oxford undergraduates left without taking a degree this was indicative of his commitment to academic work. Like many a third son, Borlase went into the Church, becoming rector of the Cornish parish Ludgvan. At Exeter he had become a friend of John St Aubyn, scion of one of Cornwall’s grandest and wealthiest families, and this led to other good connections in the county. Encouraged in his work by influential friends, Borlase corresponded with two Oxford dons about the possible uses of rock basins and attracted the attention of the poet Alexander Pope, who sought his help in sourcing the rocks and minerals needed to construct a grotto in his garden. In 1751 Borlase was elected a fellow of the Royal Society following the good reception of his treatise on Cornish crystals. Not bad for a relatively humble clergyman. Most immediately pertinent was his friendly correspondence with William Stukeley, Britain’s most famous, if not always most respected, antiquarian.22
Stukeley had made his reputation with books on Stonehenge (1740) and Avebury (1743), helping establish them as the two most famous ancient British sites in England. His work is still admired for the accuracy of his observations and the quality of his drawings. Inspired by the seminal work of the mid-seventeenth-century writer John Aubrey, Stukeley believed both sites were prehistorical Druidical temples, and he developed an elaborate and highly contentious theory of Druidical practice and ritual to reinforce his claims.23 Fundamental to Stukeley’s thinking was the long-established distinction between ‘natural’ religion, arrived at through reason, and the religion suggested by the Old Testament prophets and ‘revealed’ in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Natural and revealed religion were both aspects of the same overall divine plan. Druidical religion, Stukeley claimed, recognised one god, and the Druidical veneration of the heavenly bodies, the earth and the four elements was not polytheism – the worship of many gods – but the worship of the most extraordinary manifestations of this single deity.
As Alexandra Walsham states, the Protestant Reformation in Britain had not banished the idea that ‘God used nature as a supplementary text of revelation’.24 Ancient man, Stukeley believed, had grasped the fundamental ‘unity of the Divine Being’ and represented it in stone circles, so ‘expressive of the nature of the deity without beginning or end’.25 Thus, Stonehenge and other ancient British sites were transformed into evidence of the integrity of monotheistic religion in prehistoric Britain. Ronald Hutton, drawing together these various strands, argues that Stukeley believed ‘in a primeval religion which had been shared by all the peoples of the remote past, simply because it was the natural one for primitive humanity to embrace’. Natural religion was not spread by missionaries ‘but arose spontaneously from “the same common reason in mankind”’.26
Borlase was not convinced, and in his Observations on the Antiquities Historical and Monumental of the County of Cornwall, published in 1754, he implicitly disputed Stukeley’s patriotic conviction that the ancient British had remained true to a set of religious practices continuous with Christianity. Observations was a lavish production, notable for the many high-quality lithographs that illustrated the text, and beyond the purse of a Cornish curate. As with many similar works, Borlase relied on an extensive list of subscribers, headed by in this case Her Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of Wales and containing many Oxbridge fellows and college libraries, as well as numerous clergymen and private citizens.
Early in the Observations Borlase made it clear that he regarded ‘Druid superstition’ as a form of idolatry and a distortion of true religion. The hundred pages Borlase then devoted to explaining the origins and meaning of idolatry formed an apparently necessary preface to his full analysis of its material precipitates in Cornwall. Much of his explanation drew on contemporary theories about the racial or ethnic origins of the earliest inhabitants of Danmonia, part of the wider debate regarding the origins of the first inhabitants of the British Isles. Theological needs were at the core of these disputes, and even Stukeley, faced with the need to accommodate the biblical truth that God had taught Abraham the essentials of the true faith, diluted his belief that the British came to their primeval religion through natural processes. Instead, a means had to be found by which Abrahamic teachings could be communicated to the ancient British. Stukeley embraced the idea, long subject to historical discussion, that Britain was first colonised by the Phoenicians, Mediterranean seafaring traders.27 Thus, Abraham effectively became the first Druid, and, once in Britain, the Phoenicians maintained the purity of their Abrahamic practices.28
Borlase thought this poppycock. It defied logic that the Phoenicians, a mercantile people, were the ‘first planters of our isle’. They would only have come to the south-west peninsula if there were people to trade with. Nonetheless, Borlase did believe that traders from this seafaring people had made it from the eastern Mediterranean to Dumnonia. As trade links developed, they settled in Cornwall, bringing with them their native religious practices.29 Druidism, then, had eastern origins, but rather than celebrating these proto-British Druids for the purity of their practices, Borlase treated the Druids of ancient Dumnonia as typical of their time. Without thinking comparatively, he wrote, ‘we shall be apt to think that the Druids stand alone in all the instances of barbarity, magick, and grove-worship laid to their charge’.30 With the Danmonii cleared of an exceptional tendency towards corrupted religion, Borlase turned to what concerned him most: the causes of idolatry and its surviving material precipitates.
Borlase’s reasoning was an elaboration of conventional religious thinking, but unfolding his argument helps make sense of how his thinking shaped perceptions of the Devon and Cornwall moors. Idolatry, Borlase explained, had simple all-too-human origins. It stemmed from the difficulty of living according to the ‘strictness of life and manners’ demanded by a proper recognition of the ‘transcendent purity of God’. Those ‘who delighted in violence and wand’ring lusts’ were happy when the ‘inventive and powerful’ convinced them ‘new sorts of Deities’ existed ‘who were to be pleas’d upon easier terms’. As a consequence, the ‘natural’ religion of the ancients, which had contained within it the fundamentals of ‘revealed’ or Christian religion, was vulnerable to corruption. Unlike Stukeley but like Isaac Newton, Borlase believed that in ancient times true religion survived only within ‘the little nation of the Hebrews’: only the Jews had sustained a belief in the existence of the one true God.31
Idolatry generated a shift from monotheism (the worship of God) to polytheism (the worship of gods). Borlase maintained that polytheists believed the immortal ghosts of ‘good, great, or ingenious men (whether good or wicked)’ were capable of intervening in the mortal world and, therefore, should be worshipped. ‘Planets, Devils, Brutes and senseless Images’ including first, and most importantly, the sun, represented these ancestors and were thus appropriate subjects for worship.32 Polwhele later claimed that a number of Dartmoor place names like Bellever and Belstone stemmed from this ancient worship of Belus or the sun. Borlase explained how it became ‘customary to make gods of every thing which appeared either capable of doing harm, or necessary and beneficial to human life’. Beginning with the elements – air, earth and water – but soon expanded to include plants and herbs, flowers and trees, ancient people soon ‘made rude and shapeless stones the representatives of their fanciful Deities’. Critically, as the distinction between the absent deity and its physical representation dissolved, the people came to adore the symbol itself, ‘the huge lifeless lump of Stone’. Proliferating rituals and the erection of altars – each new god apparently required a distinct ritual – were accepted because they were adaptations of good and familiar religious practice. Borlase believed that the ‘gloomy kind of awe, and religious dread’ associated with Druidism, which was manifested in ‘Grove, and Night-worship’ and artificially heightened the affectivity of Druid ritual, was an attempt to simulate the ‘true fear of God’, which was incompatible with polytheism.33
Further evidence of how ‘a false superficial purity’ supplanted ‘a true purity of heart’ was found in the centrality to Druidical ritual of white garments and purified water. Human sacrifice, that most heinous Druidical innovation, had developed from the innocent and holy practice of animal sacrifice thanks to the false belief that the gods required what was ‘most precious to the heart of man’. Indeed, ‘when Fire became a Diety the children of the Idolater were offered and burned, that the Deity might have them, and be propitiated’. Ritual culminated in ‘Luxury and Debauch’.34 Much eighteenth-century antiquarian commentary took a prurient delight in detailing or alluding to the sensuality and sinfulness that was integral to idolatrous practice, and contemporaries associated this with the Bacchanalia thought to follow the popular rituals of Catholic penance, another false form of purification.35 Borlase found it particularly disturbing that the dead were worshipped in a manner that echoed their behaviour in life; a sinful life generated sinful religious practices. ‘If he was cruel and bloody, he was to be sacrificed unto by human victims; if he was lustful or drunken, prostitution was to attend his festival, and his propitiation was to be a scene of intemperance and debauch; if he had been avaricious, the innocent and weak were to be plundered to make a rich offering to his altar.’36 Sex, drink and plunder. These were the associations Borlase attached to the ancient monuments found in Devon and Cornwall.
These lengthy generalities were only a preface to Borlase’s extended discussion of the particularities of Druidical practice. At ninety pages or so, this far exceeded the combined length of the available classical sources,37 which was typical of a tradition that had already extrapolated on what could be learned from the classical writings. Reiterating his belief that Druidical practices were common to eastern idolatry, including human sacrifice and the ritualistic use of oak and mistletoe, Borlase nonetheless found much that was peculiar to Druidism in Britain, Ireland and Gaul. It was the basis of an entire social system, in which the elite was formed of three orders. The Druids were a kind of priesthood responsible for spiritual matters; they were supported by the Bards, who provided the community with its collective memory, and the Eubates or Vates, whose business was to foretell future events.38 Although classical authors suggested a form of Druidism might have been found in Germany and Spain, Borlase concluded – contrary to much contemporary thinking – that it was principally a phenomenon of British origin that had spread to Gaul. French antiquarians, he pointedly noted, were reluctant to admit that ‘their forefathers [were] indebted so much to this island’.39 A provoking claim given the role the Gauls and Druids had played, long before Asterix, in a patriotic French myth of resistance to Roman tyranny.40
Borlase agreed with Stukeley that the Druids, as a learned teaching order, ran schools, taught philosophy and applied themselves to research in astronomy, geography, physics and the natural world. Distrusting the written word – a neat explanation for the absence of written records – they committed everything to memory, working in the vernacular rather than Greek. Teaching and study took them to quiet places like caves, woods or cairns, which became their particular domain.41 There they contemplated the ultimate problem, the immortality of the soul and its migration at death to another human body. Borlase’s discussion became an exercise in comparative religion, emphasising how typical such beliefs were in ancient times.42 These ideas were taught through ‘the ancient Oriental manner of Allegory and Mythology’, which protected ‘their great and sublime truths’ against them becoming ‘cheap and contemptible’. This was an important claim, for like other writers on Druidism Borlase believed the Druids deliberately manufactured an air of mystery in order to maintain their authority. The parallels with Protestant critiques of Catholicism need hardly be emphasised. Drawing on Seneca’s claim that ‘a grove thick set with ancient Oaks … immediately makes you think it the habitation of some God’, Borlase acidly commented that Druidical ritual occurred in groves because ‘without this solemn scene of shade and silence, the mind could not be disposed to embrace so readily all the fabulous relations of their false gods, much less to comply with all the absurd and detestable rites of their idolatrous worship’.43
Around the same time Burke made a similar claim in his Essay on the Sublime. ‘To make any thing very terrible,’ he suggested, ‘obscurity seems in general to be necessary.’ Obscurity, or insufficient knowledge, generated fear, a state of mind in which ‘all motions are suspended’, whereas full understanding – enlightenment – tended to diminish fear, allowing individuals to rationalise the threats they faced. Despotism, according to Burke, was sustained by ‘the passion of fear’, and this relied, at least in part, on keeping the chief obscured ‘from the public eye’: the chief’s power lay in the fact that he was kept unknowable, a claim that chimed with contemporary ideas about ‘oriental despotism’. The same applied to the maintenance of many religions, hence the fact that ‘almost all heathen temples were dark’. ‘For this purpose too,’ Burke added, ‘the druids performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading oaks.’44 Reading Borlase through Burke, particularly as evident in his preoccupation with darkness and deception, suggests the ways in which Protestant enlightenment thinking structured his argument.
If fear sustained Druidism, then nothing could be more horrifying than human sacrifice. Borlase reckoned that convicts were usually used, though in their absence an innocent might be found or, should the circumstances be thought sufficiently grave, children or even a prince were selected. The unhappy victim – shot with arrows, crucified, impaled, burned or bled to death – was first assured that through sacrifice their soul would be translated to heaven and their remains become a holy relic. When stabbed to death, the direction in which the body fell was thought prophetic. Most ‘monstrous’, victims were crammed into a huge image, usually a bull, made from wicker, which was set on fire, ‘consuming that, and the inclos’d in one holocaust’. Some of the remains, according to Pliny (says Borlase), were eaten; the rest were burned on the altar. ‘Intemperance in drinking generally clos’d the sacrificing’; the altar was reconsecrated by strewing oak leaves on it.45
Borlase’s page or two on human sacrifice was a small part of a much longer discussion of Druidical rites that included ‘Superstitious Rounds and Turnings of the Body’, ‘Holy Fires’ and ‘Divination, Charms and Incantations’. He noted the great resemblance between Druidical and Persian superstition – another nod towards the oriental – and reminded his readers that Phoenician traders were responsible for bringing all this ghastliness to Britain. When, here, he finally turned the attention of his enthralled – or exhausted? – readers to his discussion of ‘Rude Stone-Monuments’, he commenced with portentous comment: ‘The precariousness of human life, and the uncertainty of worldly affairs, taught people very soon after the Creation to endeavour by some memorials to perpetuate the remembrance of those persons and events, which had been of importance in their time.’46
The reference to ‘very soon after Creation’ is a reminder that Borlase, like his contemporaries, thought according to a time frame determined by scriptural authority. Notoriously, Bishop Ussher had calculated that the earth was created in 4004 BC and the flood occurred in 2448 BC. Mankind, therefore, could not have settled in Britain before 2400 BC. This meant that this history of pre-Roman Britain had to be ‘squeezed into about eighty generations’.47 Only in the later decades of the eighteenth century did new thinking begin to overturn biblical authority and generate notions of geological time.48
Borlase’s discussion of the monuments built in those pre-Roman years was extraordinarily learned, drawing extensively on biblical and classical texts, modern authorities (notably William Camden and John Toland) and comparisons with Ireland and Scotland. Methodologically, it was a masterclass in the methods of eighteenth-century antiquarianism, demonstrating how classical texts, carefully read and compared with the help of modern interpretations, could be used to explain the former uses of ancient monuments. Although every sort of monument could not be directly accounted for, the degree to which the antiquarian could demonstrate his mastery of the authoritative texts determined the degree to which his speculations were taken seriously. Admitting an analysis was speculative provided cover for the ventilation of ideas with no real basis in the source material and was a way of displaying a kind of antiquarian sophistication.
Borlase observed that ancient stone monuments had a variety of uses. They could be ‘of a truly Religious Institution’, either as symbols of gratitude, a religious covenant or commitment, or sepulchral, being a monument to a burial; or they could be of civil significance, marking boundaries or functioning as memorials to contracts made or military exploits. Crucially, Borlase argued that a holy site could outlive its original meaning or purpose and come to be used by civil institutions as an appropriately august location for courts, councils or official ceremonies. Where such places were found to be associated with the superstitious beliefs of the present-day peasantry, antiquarians interpreted these beliefs as vestiges of earlier, more formalised belief systems.49 By drawing on folklore often ignored by earlier topographers and antiquarians fearful of preserving superstitious ideas alongside classical, biblical and more recent scholarly texts, Borlase’s work was both at the methodological cutting edge and indicative of a Protestant confidence.50
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