To the archaeologist and the antiquarian Devonshire is one of the most interesting counties in England. With the exception of Cornwall no other district is so rich in relics of the ancient inhabitants of Britain; and it was from the caves of this county that Pengelly obtained that clear evidence of the extreme antiquity of man in this island which proved that he lived here, unnumbered ages back, when such animals as the cave-lion, the hyaena, and the mammoth ran wild in what we now call England.

Palaeolithic Flint Implement
(From Kent's Cavern)

The people who inhabited Britain before the coming of the Romans are said to have belonged to the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, or the Iron Age, according to the material which they used for their tools and weapons; and the first of these epochs is further divided into the Earlier and the Later Stone Ages, or the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Periods. The implements of the former were very roughly fashioned of chipped, unpolished flint; those of the latter were more skilfully made, and were sometimes very highly finished.

Relics of all these periods have been found in Devonshire, but it is not always possible to say to which age a particular weapon or implement belongs. The use of flint for arrow-heads, for example, certainly continued long after the invention of bronze; and bronze was employed, especially for ornaments, long after iron had come into regular use.

Traces of Palaeolithic man are nowhere common, and they are rare in Devonshire; but they have been found, in the shape of massive tools of roughly chipped flint, in Kent's Cavern near Torquay, in the Cattedown Cave, now destroyed, near Plymouth, and in the river-drift near Axminster. Very fine examples have been obtained from a ballast-pit at Broome.

Remains belonging to the Neolithic Age, on the other hand, are not only much more abundant, but are of greater variety, showing an advance in knowledge of the arts of life, and they include not only axe-heads, spear-points, and arrow-tips of flint, in some cases beautifully finished, but weapons and ornaments of bone and horn, rude pottery, spindle-whorls, and even primitive musical instruments. No traces of the dwellings of the people of this age, except as regards the caves that sheltered some of them and their predecessors of the earlier time, have yet been found, nor of their graves, if we except the Spinster's Rock, two miles west of Drewsteignton. This is a dolmen consisting of three huge stones, on which rests a still larger block, twelve feet long and estimated at sixteen tons in weight; it doubtless was a Neolithic burying-place.

Dolmen near Drewsteignton

Relics of the Bronze Age are far more abundant, and they form, indeed, the chief archaeological feature of Devonshire. Dartmoor in particular, chiefly perhaps because its great upland wilderness has never been broken up by the plough, is dotted all over with remains of primitive Bronze Age dwellings, sometimes standing alone, sometimes grouped in villages and surrounded by a wall, and also with many stone circles, tumuli, kistvaens, menhirs, and rows of upright stones. It is, moreover, intersected by a network of ancient trackways, linking settlement to settlement.

Palstave of the Bronze Age
(In Exeter Museum)

The best example of an early Bronze Age village is Grimspound, eight miles north-east of Princetown. It consists of twenty-four round huts made of stone slabs set on end and standing about three feet above ground, scattered over a space of about four acres, surrounded by a nearly circular double wall, from nine to fourteen feet thick, and about five feet high, built of blocks of granite, some of which are tons in weight. Half the huts contain fire-hearths, which have been much used; and a good many have raised stone benches, from eight inches to a foot high. Except that the roofs, which were no doubt made of poles and thatch, have disappeared, these primitive dwellings, of which there are hundreds on Dartmoor, are probably much in the same condition as when they were inhabited, perhaps 2000 years ago. It has been suggested that Grimspound, like many ancient camps or hill-forts, was a place of refuge in times of danger, rather than a permanently occupied fortress.

Fernworthy Circle, near Chagford

The objects found in these and similar dwellings consist of flint implements, pottery—some of it decorated—spindle-whorls, and cooking-stones such as are still in use among the Eskimo. So far, no fragment of metal of any kind has been discovered, from which it might, perhaps, have been inferred that the huts were the work of a race unacquainted with the use of metal. But the pottery so closely resembles that found in the burial-mounds of the Bronze Age that archaeologists are satisfied that the dwellings belong to that period.

Hurston Stone Alignment

Other remarkable monuments are the stone circles, or upright, unhewn blocks of granite arranged in rings, of which there are many on Dartmoor, and of which some of the finest are the Grey Wethers near Post Bridge, and similar structures near Chagford and on Langstone Moor; the avenues or alignments, consisting of rows of stones set up in straight lines, as at Merivale Bridge, Hurston, and Challacombe; and the menhirs, which are single stones, sometimes twelve feet high, of which the best are at Drizlecombe, at Merivale, and on Langstone Moor.

Triple Stone Row and Circle near Headlands, Dartmoor

It is probable that these structures were connected with primitive forms of worship, but Sir Norman Lockyer has endeavoured to show, in one of the most fascinating chapters of archaeological research, that the circles and avenues, and the monoliths or menhirs connected with them, were in all probability set up as rough astronomical instruments for observing the rising of the sun or of particular stars, in order to regulate the true length of the year. It is even possible, he contends, to form some idea of the date of their erection. Thus the two avenues at Merivale were probably laid out at different times, one about 1610 B.C., and the other about 1420 B.C., in order to watch the sunrise in May, which was then regarded as the first month of the year; while the avenues at Challacombe, among the most remarkable of all the monuments, are probably of far older date, perhaps 3500 B.C., and seem to have been arranged for the observation of sunrise in November, a month long accepted by some Celtic tribes as marking the beginning of the year.

Kistvaens, of which nearly 100 have been found, almost all of them on Dartmoor, are small stone burial chambers, generally used for the reception of the burnt ashes of the dead, probably in many instances originally covered with earth, and made of four slabs of granite set on edge, forming a sort of vault, with another and more massive stone laid on the top. Specially good examples have been found at Fernworthy, on Lakehead Hill, and at Plymouth. The most remarkable kistvaen—belonging, however, to a later period, when burial had displaced cremation—was that discovered on Lundy, containing a human skeleton eight feet two inches in length.

Tumuli or burial mounds, called cairns when they are made of small stones, and barrows when they are merely piles of earth, are to be seen in all parts of Devonshire, especially on high ground, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups of from two to ten or twelve, and always round. No long barrows have been discovered in the county.

The men of the Bronze Age reached a much higher stage of civilisation than their stone-using predecessors, and very fine examples of their bronze swords, daggers, spear-heads and axes; of their pottery, some of it finely decorated; and of their ornaments, including beads of shale and clay and amber, and an amber dagger-hilt with studs of gold, have been found at various places in Devonshire.

Relics that can be attributed with certainty to the prehistoric Iron Age are rare, partly, no doubt, because iron so quickly rusts away. Some very remarkable remains of this period were however found on Stamford Hill near Plymouth, during the construction of a fort, when the workmen dug into an ancient burial-ground, in which, in addition to human bones, were discovered red, black, and yellow pottery, mirrors and finger rings of bronze, fragments of beautiful amber-tinted glass, and some much-corroded cutting-instruments of iron. In the old camp called Holne Chase Castle, a man digging out a rabbit came upon about a dozen bars of rusty iron, two feet long, nearly two inches broad, and a quarter of an inch thick, which although at first mistaken, as has been the case elsewhere, for unfinished sword-blades, were subsequently identified as specimens of the iron currency-bars which passed as money among the ancient Britons. British coins of gold, silver, and copper have been found in several places, particularly at Exeter and at Mount Batten near Plymouth. The commonest are of what is known as the Channel Islands type, bearing the effigy of a horse rudely imitated from the Macedonian stater, and probably struck about 200 B.C.

A special feature of the prehistoric antiquities of Devonshire is the great number of camps or hill-forts, of which there are more than 140; some in the heart of the county, some on the coast, often on prominent headlands, and some along the lines of division between this and the adjoining shires; showing in many instances great military skill and knowledge both in construction and in the choice of good, defensive sites. Two of the most remarkable of the many strongholds, both near Honiton, are the great encampment of Dumpdon and the magnificently planned fortress of Hembury—a monument of military skill. Another fine example is Hawkesdown, the strongest of the chain of border forts—of which Membury and Musbury are two important links—built along the river Axe as defences against the ancient inhabitants of Dorsetshire. One of the largest and most elaborate of all is Clovelly Dykes, twenty acres in extent, and defended by from three to five lines of intricate earthworks. Another remarkable fort, and the largest in the county, is Milber Down, two miles south-east of Newton Abbot.

Bronze Centaur forming the Head of a Roman Standard
(Found at Sidmouth)

There is no real clue to the makers of these fortresses. Roman coins have been found in several of them, but there is not one which competent authorities attribute to the Romans, and it is probable that they were built by British tribes during the ages of Bronze and of Iron, but perhaps chiefly by the Gaels or Goidels. A few of them have played a part in modern history. Cadbury, for instance, was occupied by Fairfax in 1645; and in 1688 the Prince of Orange parked his artillery in the great fort of Milber Down, a camp which it is thought was not only occupied but adapted by the Romans.