inscribed as title and dated "1874"
The Dartmoor Crosses are a series of stone crosses found in Dartmoor National Park in the centre of Devon, England. Many of them are old navigational aids, needed because of the remoteness of the moorland and its typically bad weather. Some mark medieval routes between abbeys. Other crosses were erected as memorials, for prayer, as town or market crosses, in churchyards, and as boundary markers. The crosses were erected over a long period of time, some as recently as 100 years ago, the earliest probably almost 1,000 years ago.
In 2005, the Dartmoor National Park Authority had an ongoing project to microchip the most vulnerable of its granite artifacts, including crosses, to deter theft and aid the recovery of any that might be stolen.
There is a legend attached to the origin of the original crosses. The story says that there were four monks who did not want to follow their abbot's rules on austere living. Once the abbot went to Italy, the four brothers decided to celebrate, yet they needed some money. They robbed and killed a wealthy Jew. In the same evening, the brothers were called to the nearby moor, which was covered in snow and ice at the time. When they reached the place, they realized that the messenger who had beckoned them was the ghost of the murdered Jewish man.
The ghost hypnotized them, and they wandered into the mire, fell through the ice, and were sucked into the thick bog. The abbot, who knew nothing about the murder of the old Jew and assumed they had run off out of guilt when they saw him coming home, ordered that the crosses be erected to mark the tracks from one monastery to another to prevent future monks from getting lost.
Mary Keightley (1854-1946) was the youngest daughter of Archibald Keightley (1795-1877), executor of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s estate. She was a good amateur artist. Archibald Keightley (1795-1877), who was a solicitor who was the executor for Sir Thomas Lawrence, who had died earlier in 1830. Mr Keightley was responsible for the sale of Sir Thomas's collections, some of which were not paid for! There is a very interesting story about Sir Thomas's collection of old master drawings which were part of the assets Mr Keightley hadto dispose of. Following his work as a solicitor, Mr Keightley a few years later became the Registrar for the Charterhouse School, where he remained for 39 years.
Mary Keightley was born in 1854, in Charterhouse, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom, her father, Archibald Keightley, was 58 and her mother, Sarah Elizabeth Yates, was 41. She lived in London, England for about 20 years and Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, United Kingdom in 1891. She died on 20 April 1946, in Camberley, Surrey, England, United Kingdom, at the age of 93.