Chun Castle

Wednesday 7 August 1996. The Cornwall holiday continues... We split up for the day, Mum and Dad coming with Fran and myself round some stone circles and hill forts whilst the rest went to a theme park. We drove round the coast past Zennor where a legend says, a mermaid was so enchanted by the sound of a chorister's voice from the church that she enticed him into the sea and he lived with her wrinkly ever after from then on.

This is Chun Castle, (it's pronounced "Choon"), an Iron Age hillfort. At one point you could walk from the east of Britain to the Netherlands, or Germany but Britain was cut off from the rest of Europe when the last ice age melted and formed the North Sea. Whilst the first cities were being built in the middle east the British were still living in stick and mud huts in fortified circles on the tops of hills. The fort dates from around 300-200 BCE and has two rings of walls and a ditch surrounding it.

The gorse was in abundance - the farmer on whose land we parked told me the weather "...has been very good for the shrubs this year. You'll have to mind it!" The gorse looks lovely from a distance. Close up it has small two inch branches covered in spine like leaves which just then were pricking through trousers and skirts and up to shirts and tops as the bushes were anything up to 3 feet tall! Mum gave up in the face of the gorse (well it came farther up on her than anyone else as she's a bit smaller than the rest of us!) and she went back to sit in the car whilst we explored. The photo shows a clearing in the centre of the fort with the remains of what I first took to be someone's hearth, but which has been described as an iron or tin smelting furnace. Slag heaps of both metals were found within the fort.

Chun Castle boasts the foundations of much of its surrounding defensive wall, now reduced to what looks like a pile of rubble in the shape of a huge ring. It's still around five feet in height although originally it would have been around four times that size. It has a couple of gateposts still standing. The hillfort is in a superb position on the Lands End peninsula and you can see both the south and west coasts from its wall which afforded its residents some amount of warning should an enemy appear.

In a clearing in the gorse which now covers most of the interior, the castle's well, choked with fallen stone can be seen. A set of stone stairs led down to the water which still finds its way into the well even now. It was still used by locals upto c1940. Some sources suggest that locals thought it would give them perpetual youth. If so there must have been some sort of mass exodus from the area as there are definately not two and a half to three thousand years worth of youths living nearby... Also clearly visible from the fort are the remains of a couple of the distinctive engine houses of Cornish tin mines.

A couple of gate posts or markers stood along the path into the fort. A further post from the outer wall stands behind my viewpoint.

It can be seen in this view, just behind the only other person we saw that morning at Chun. At some point the layout of the entrance was changed to create a dog's leg turn between the two gates in the outer and inner walls, and the fort has been described as being far more advanced in its military design than other forts of the same period.

The gatepost from the outer wall. Fran and Dad decided to go back and keep Mum company as we had been mooching around for quite a while and she may have been wondering if we'd fallen down the well and just run off like the children we may have become... Meanwhile I have one more thing to see which will take me back in time a further two to three thousand years from the hillfort. But that, as a quizmaster would say just before a TV break, is why you will come back tomorrow - won't you?

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