Page:Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries.djvu/472

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Of Dartmcor and Us Borderland. 97 suggest may once have surmounted Childe's Tomb. There is nothing improbable in the supposition, as it may very well have been brought to the house, and not being required there, removed with other material for the wall. It consisted only of the top part of the shaft, with one complete arm, and a portion of the other, and it had evidently been buried for some time. It does not appear to have been quite so large as the one just described. From the top of the shaft to the point of fracture it measures one foot nine inches, and from the extremity of the uninjured arm to the end of the remaining portion of the other, it is two feet one inch. We now ascend the slope in front of us, still pursuing an easterly direction, and shall soon reach a grassy track, not very plainly marked, except for a short distance, but yet discernible in its course through the heather. Ere we have proceeded far we shall come upon a cross lying by the side of the path, the shaft of which has been broken, but is now repaired. When I was first informed, by one who had spent all his days in the vicinity, of the existence of crosses on this hill, the stone we have reached lay beside another, now standing erect, rather over a hundred yards distant. A few years later, having brought the matter to the notice of the Dartmoor Preservation Association, it was decided, in 1885, to re-erect them and others in the neighbourhood, the one we have just examined in Fox Tor Newtake being among the number. This cross was moved to its present situation merely for the reason that to have erected it where it lay would have meant placing it almost close to its fellow. Mr. E. Fearnley Tanner, the honorary secretary of the Association, conducted the operations, and under his direction holes were drilled in the sides of the shaft, and the pieces clamped together. A portion being missing, they did not fit closely, and it cannot be said that the work was altogether satisfactory. However, the cross was set upright in a hole in the ground, there being no socket-stone in which to fix it. In consequence of this it is much to be regretted that it did not long remain erect. One of its arms across which was a deep crack was broken off, soon after it was set up, by cattle using it as a rubbing-post. It has remained in its present prostrate position for years, but if a socket-stone two H