Wistman's Wood and Isabella Courtney

Wistman's Wood - Some rights reserved by Warwick Conway http://www.flickr.com/photos/warcon/4421870196/sizes/l/in/photostream/

"THE countess Isabella [Courtney of Powderham] is accredited with having planted the oaks of Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor."

Hewett 1900

Map - Wistman's Wood
Map - Powderham

Druids on Dartmoor

'There are also charms for the antiquarian on Dartmoor, in the remains of altars, logans and cromlechs, scattered over it, showing that it was once a sacred spot for Druid worship; names testifying to the same fact belong also to many of the tors, as Bel-tor, Mis-tor, Ham-tor, and others. Very rude are the materials of which these relics are formed, proving their great antiquity, and carrying our thoughts back for centuries to the day when the British priests burned incense to Bel or Baal, to the moon, the planets and the host of heaven; and sacrificed human victims to their false gods...

...There are few trees on Dartmoor, except Wistman or Whistman's Wood. It is situated about a mile north of Two Bridges, which is nearly in the centre of the moor, upon the side of a steep hill opposite Blair Down, forming the side of a valley through which a branch of the beautiful river Dart runs.

These remains of an ancient forest are supposed to have been one of the sacred groves so essential to Druidical worship, and which were full of evidences of cruelty, bodies of men being often nailed to the trees and suffered there to decay. It has been asserted by a writer on Cornwall, that Wistman's Wood is nearly in the same state now that it was at the time of the Norman Conquest.

The ascent to it is strewn with immense masses of granite, and starting from among them, wildly scattered, is a grove of diminutive oak trees, that look as if hundreds of centuries had passed since they first grew in Wistman's Wood; they are none of them above twelve feet high, and they spread wide arms at their tops, and their moss-covered branches twist and coil into each other in most fantastic fashion. Among these rocks and trees adders find a habitation.'

Valentine (undated)

Wistmans Wood

'Wistman's Wood, one of the lions of Dartmoor, probably takes its name from whisht, a Devonshire synonym for "uncanny." It is a group of stunted and gnarled oaks, mixed with ferns and mountain ash, rooted among mossy boulders which make rough scrambling. There are said to be some five hundred of these trees many of them several centuries old, but none more than 10 or 12 feet high. One tradition gives them as planted in the 13th century by Isabella de Fortibus, Countess of Devon; but this weird wood appears to be still older. It is naturally connected with the Druids, and another derivation finds its name in their synonym ' The Wise Men." Both stories and trees answer doubly to ancient ideas of a sacred place, and few superstitious natives would care to find themselves here in the dark. It is haunted by adders, which make a real danger ~ one should be careful in picking one's steps among the boulders and their choked-up interstices. While this primeval wood seems almost as ancient as the stone monuments around it, the greenery in the adjacent Cowsick glen has been carefully nursed into beauty within our own century.'

Hope Moncrieff 1895

Wistmans Wood and the Wish Hounds

'Wistman's Wood, with its "hundred oaks one hundred yards high,"--a remnant of the old Dartmoor Forest,--is the very home of the Wish hounds, which hunt so fiercely over the Moor; and this Wistman appears to have been some demon creature, whose name alone remains. Mr Kemble gives Wusc, or Wisc, as one of the 'names of Odin. Here we have a similar name given to a strange wood in Devonshire, associated with wild superstitions; and whish, or whisht, is a common term for that weird sorrow which is associated with mysterious causes.'

Hunt 1903