Alfred Lionel Lewis

“ We can picture to ourselves the men hunting, fishing, tending their cattle, and perhaps engaging in some rudimentary agricultural employment, or manufacturing flint tools and weapons from the lumps of flint which in Cornwall were obtained from the north-east, either by parties organized from their own villages, or from caravans of traders from beyond the Tamar. ”

“ Up to the end of last season seventy-nine huts which showed signs of human occupancy had been explored in various parts of Dartmoor, of which thirty-seven have yielded tools, flakes, and cores of flint; twenty-six have shown remains of pottery; thirty had cooking holes, some of which contained round-bottomed vessels of coarse pottery, red outside and black within; twelve have produced rubbing stones, and nearly all have contained cooking stones. ”

“ Most of the huts, when cleared of the accumulation of vegetable soil with which they were filled, were found to contain a low platform or dais, formed of curbstones with straight edges, all natural, but selected for the purpose, and laid in the soil, cutting off a portion of the circumference, which portion was generally carried out so as to afford additional width and depth to the dais, which was usually paved, and probably served as a seat for the inhabitants by day and as a bed at night. ”

“ The ancient population of the moors, which was apparently more numerous than that of the present day, must have left considerable quantities of refuse in the shape of bones, which, if they could be found, would enable zoologists to tell us what animals and birds they reared, or hunted, and lived upon ”

“ Others consider the circles of standing stones to be merely the remains of the circular walls of large stone towers, but that idea hardly requires serious notice. On Dartmoor there are also numerous long rows of small standing stones, which frequently have a small circle, with or without a barrow inside it, at one end of the line, or it may be a barrow without a circle. ”

“ Another reflection arising from this is that the dwellings in Ireland and elsewhere which strike visitors from England as being so extremely uncivilized, are not the result of degradation of the inhabitants, but rather of their not having advanced in that particular much beyond the fashions of their ancestors of two or three thousand years ago. ”