Chagford, one of the earliest stannary towns, important then for tin, is now equally important for tourism. Eden Phillpotts and his semi biographer Kenneth Day provide a very poetic but nonetheless real introduction.

Children of the Mist has for its setting the little town of Chagford nestling amid the lush countryside that presses upon Dartmoor's eastern flanks. In this book, the first of the Dartmoor Cycle novels, Eden Phillpotts provides description here in plenty .. integrated and intertwined with the narrative and action of the story.

"Above Chagford rise those lofty outposts of Dartmoor, named respectively Nattadown and Middledown. The first lies nearer to the village, and upon its side, beneath a fir wood which crowns one spur, spread steep wastes of fern and furze. . . The hill fell abruptly away, and near the bottom glimmered whitewashed cots along a winding road. Still lower down, extended marshy common land, laced with twinkling water-courses and dotted with geese; while beyond, in many a rise and fall and verdant undulation, the country rolled onwards through Teign valley and upwards towards the Moor."

"On Wattern, at Cranmere, upon Fur Tor and under the hoary, haunted woods of Wistman, no glad beacons blazed or voices rang. There Nature, ignorant of epochs and heeding neither olympiad nor lustrum, cycle nor century, ruled alone. . . Seed and stone, blade and berry, hot blood and cold, did her bidding and slept or stirred at her ordinance. A night jar harshly whirred beneath her footstool; wan tongues of flame rose and fell upon her quaking altars; a mountain fox, pattering quick-footed to the rabbit warren, caught light from those exhalations in his round, green eyes and barked."

"Upon the shaggy fastnesses of Devon's central waste, within the bounds, metes, and precincts of Dartmoor Forest, there shone a whole constellation of little suns, and a wanderer in air might have counted a hundred without difficulty, whilst for the beholders perched upon Yes Tor, High Willhays, or the bosom of Cosdon during the fairness and clearness of that memorable night, fully threescore beacons flamed. All those granite giants within the field of man's activities, all the monsters whose enormous shades fell at dawn or evening time upon the hamlets and villages of the Moor, now carried on their lofty crowns the flames of rejoicing."