A Deathly Game of Quoits

Wednesday 7 August 1996. Dad and Fran left me at Chun Castle and I walked a couple of hundred yards to Chun Quoit, pronounced "choon", a megalithic burial chamber. This was older than the nearby hill fort by two or three thousand years.

It was originally built to house the bones of one or more of our earliest farmers who had learned how to grow their own crops and maybe raise domesticated cattle rather than be perpetually on the move as hunter gatherers.

It's one of around eight such surviving quoits (also known as dolmens or cromlechs). The name quoit came about due to early local superstition that the capstones (often the only feature showing above ground) may have been thrown there by giants, playing a game of quoits. They may either originally or at some point in their past have been covered by a mound of earth, a kerbstone suggests at least some form of surrounding structure.

I walked all the way around it a couple of times, enjoying the atmsphere that comes with places that you know were once of some great importance to those who built them, but that some of the purpose may have been forgotten or even misinterpreted by modern scholars. It could easily have been a place where on propitious days / nights / seasonal changes, the holy men of the community may have come here to talk to the spirits of their loved ones or guardians, perhaps inhaling smoke to put them in a trance, perhaps sitting in a circle with their equivalent of a bag of chips, singing Gin Gan Goolie, Goolie, Goolie, Goolie... It must have come from somewhere...

I set the camera on the ground and used the self-timer to take my own photo for posterity.

Turning away from the quoit for a moment this was the magnificent view from the site. Then I braved the gorse spines again (Gin Gan - OUCH! Stop yer warblin', mind yer...) and returned to the car and we drove about half a mile to another quoit, Lanyon Quoit.

Easily found in a field just at the side of the road this quoit was originally tall enough for a man on horseback to ride underneath the capstone without bending his head. My sense of humour would like to say that this is because the horse's head would have crashed into it first, but in truth it was indeed possible to ride beneath the capstone! A violent thunderstorm in 1826 caused the quoit's collapse and it was re-erected, but with the supporting stones sunk deep into the earth. The people of 1826 were taking no chances... "I'm not lifting yon bloody stone again and that's for sure!"

The cromlechs or quoits of Cornwall are as mysterious and atmospheric as you can make them. Lanyon is a bit too close to the roadway to have an atmosphere. At Chun Quoit you can be quite alone with this mysterious chamber of the dead. Would you dare go at night to see if any spirits remain?

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