Explore "A Book of Dartmoor" by Sabine Baring-Gould on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Cairns on Dartmoor -- Why mostly in solitary places and / on hilltops -- The theory of wearing mourning -- Its real / origin -- Various modes of deceiving the dead or discouraging them / from returning -- The desire of the ghost to get home -- Is cajoled / or scared away -- How widows get rid of the ghosts of their first / husbands -- Disguising the dead.
One of the most striking experiences of an explorer of Dartmoor is the coming upon great cairns in the most remote and inaccessible parts of that waste. Not a lone hill surrounded by bogs is without its great mound of earth or pile of stones over some dead man. In the howling wilderness about Cranmere Pool, where are no traces of human habitation, there lie the dead. On every rise above the swamps and fathomless morasses of Fox Tor, there they are scattered thick. Almost always the dead were conveyed to the tops of hills, or placed on the brows of elevations far away from the settlements of the living.