D CHAPTER IV DEAN PRIOR EAN PRIOR, to which Herrick was "banished" in the autumn of 1629, is a parish of about four thousand acres, situated on the south-eastern slopes of Dartmoor. The high-road from Exeter to Plymouth passes through the scattered village, and within a five miles' radius of Herrick's church lie the ancient townships of Totnes and Ashburton. Modern civilisation, as represented by railways and factories, has laid the lightest of fingers upon Dean Prior, and to this day the village, though somewhat shrunk in size and importance, presents to the visitor very much the same appearance that it did to Herrick on his arrival there in 1629. Many of the cottages still retain their thatched roofs and penthouses, their open hearths and massive chimneys; and though the manor-houses have been shorn of much of their former splendour, they have at any rate been spared the hand of the modern renovator. Age, so far from withering their pristine beauty, has enhanced it by the mellowed colours of stone and woodwork. Ivy, roses, and honeysuckle creep over the cottages, and the little roadside gardens are still gay with the flowers which we meet with in the Hesperidesdaffodils, primroses, violets, and wallflowers, the crimson pæony, and the stately white lily. In the valley are water-meadows, each meadow irrigated in the characteristic Devonian manner by "leats" which bring fertility from the Dartmoor streams; and above these, climbing upwards towards the heather moors, are the cornfields, the bright red earth of which glows in the early spring sunshine. But the chief beauty of the village lies in its apple orchards, which creep close to the church and the cottages and follow the devious windings of Dean Burn. For six months of the year the trees are grey with ragged lichen, but in the first warm days of May, the greyness is hidden beneath sheets of rosy "blooth," to be followed, as spring and summer merge into autumn, by clusters of golden fruit. There is no more characteristic feature of the combes of South Devon than these apple orchards, and they must at the same time have recalled to Herrick's mind the uda Mobilibus pomaria rivis of Horace's Tibur, and thus have led him to compare his Devonshire glebe with the Sabine farm of the famous Roman lyrist. Dean Burn, to which Herrick has given enduring obloquy, is a typical Dartmoor stream. Taking its rise on the moors to the west of the village, it makes its way first of all through a rocky gorge where buzzard and carrion crow find a resting place, only to lose itself later among thick coppices of scrub-oak and hazel. Even when the combe widens and the waters of the burn grow more placid, it still preserves something of its "warty incivility": Thy rocky bottom, that doth tear thy streams Were thy streams silver, or thy rocks all gold? 1 1 The stream divides the parish of Dean Prior from that of Buckfastleigh, and at last pours its waters into those of the Dart, not far from the walls of the old Cistercian abbey of Buckfast. The background to this picture of cornfields and watered meadows, orchards and woodlands, is formed by great stretches of moorland, the soft contours of which are now and again broken by rugged granite tors. As one stands in Dean Prior churchyard, and looks northward across the valley of the Dart, a wide stretch of this moorland scenery skirts the horizon and adds an element of grandeur and vastness to the idyllic beauty which lies at one's feet. But for 1 To Dean Burn (86). |