Some of the tors still retained their Druidical names, such as Bel-Tor,
Ham-Tor, Mis-Tor; and there were many remains of altars, logans, and
cromlechs scattered over the moors, proving their great antiquity and
pointing to the time when the priests of the Britons burned incense and
offered human victims as sacrifices to Bel and Baal and to the Heavenly
bodies.
There was another contingency to be considered in crossing Dartmoor in
the direction we had intended--especially in the case of a solitary
traveller journeying haphazard--and that was the huge prison built by
the Government in the year 1808 on the opposite fringe of the Moor to
accommodate prisoners taken during the French wars, and since converted
into an ordinary convict settlement. It was seldom that a convict
escaped, for it was very difficult to cross the Moor, and the prison
dress was so well known all over the district; but such cases had
occurred, and one of these runaways, to whom a little money and a change
of raiment would have been acceptable, might have been a source of
inconvenience, if not of danger, to any unprotected traveller, whom he
could have compelled to change clothing.
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