Name and Place Index

to

The Rock Inscriptions at Beardown

by

Arthur B. Prowse. M.D. Lond., F.R.C.S. England

Trans. Devon. Assoc. vol. XXXVI (1904), pp. 127-134.

Index prepared by Michael Steer

Dr. Prowse’s extraordinary Paper was delivered at the Association’s July 1904 Teignmouth meeting. Rev. Edward Atkyns Bray acquired Beardown House, to the North of Two Bridges, in about 1802, with his wife, Anna Eliza Bray, a reasonably celebrated quasi-historical fiction novelist. He believed avidly in Druids and his dream on retirement was to recreate a mystical land on Dartmoor. After his death in 1816, their son, also Edward, arranged to have carved in large font, a great many poetic inscriptions on stones and massive rock faces along the Cowsic River, and dedicated this fanciful poetry to a variety of classical and modern poets. The “Legendary Dartmoor” website contains a stinging condemnation of the wealthy Bray family’s delusion-fueled graffiti desecration of Dartmoor’s unique wilderness scenery. 
The Paper’s author, Dr Arthur Bancks Prowse, was a surgeon at the Royal Bristol Infirmary and Lecturer on Pharmacology at the Bristol Medical School. His obituary appears in the British Medical Journal for May 1925, available here.
The Paper, from a copy of a rare journal can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. Google has sponsored the digitisation of books from several libraries. These books, on which copyright has expired, are available for free educational and research use, both as individual books and as full collections to aid researchers.