Publisher's Synopsis
Dartmoor is a fine-sounding name, and no one would wish to displace it; yet in one sense it is a misleading and inappropriate designation of the great central Devonshire moorland. The moorland is not distinctively the moor of the Dart, any more than of the Teign, the Tavy, or the Ockment; it is the cradle-land of rivers, and there is no obvious reason why the Dart should have assumed such supremacy. But there is historic fitness about the title. It is probable that the Saxons first became acquainted with Dartmoor from the fertile district known as the South Hams, watered by the beautiful reaches of the Dart from Totnes to its mouth. The wide intermediate waste that lay between the North and the South Hams was a region of mystery to them, and they associated it with this swift, sparkling stream that issued from its cleaves and bogs.
