Cornish Mysteries

Back again to 9 August 1989. In the last entry we had been to Zennor and met up with the mermaid, but this was to be a day filled with mysterious things. I drove further along towards Lands End until I reached Morvah and then turned inland - as far as you can drive inland from this point. By now I was at the narrowest part of the Cornish peninsula, between Morvah and Penzance. I stopped at a lay-by for an artist's studio and started to walk north east along a dirt path. I walked for about a quarter of an hour, passing an old stone stile and starting to wonder a few times whether I was heading the right way!

But I was! Men-an-Tol is what I had come to see. A holed stone centred between two standing stones. The associated legend says that children with diseases such as rickets were passed through the hole in the hope of a cure. Whilst this sounds like so much superstition; the base granite of Cornwall emits a high background level of radiation. Geiger counters have proved that there is a hot spot in the centre of the hole and so passing through it would give the equivalent of a mild radiotherapy. Those Bronze Age folks knew a thing or two! Apparently there is a local legend that says that if a woman passes through the holed stone seven times backwards at full moon, she will soon become pregnant. Of course this is more likely if she backs through naked and a naked man is standing behind her as she comes through the hole... Having waited for a while to see if any naked women would turn up, I gave up and walked back to the car, my next destination being no more than 5 minutes away down the same road.

This is Lanyon Quoit, once the chamber of a tomb but denuded of its earth mound. It collapsed in a storm in 1826, one of the supporting stones being shattered. Consequently the capstone is now much lower than it was. Originally a man on horseback could pass under it.

I had lunch in the King William IV inn at Madron. An ancient inn, this was an excellent choice, the one or two locals wanted to know what I was doing so far away from the tourist spots and I really felt welcomed. From there I reached the south coast and turned west to find my next mysterious place of the day.

Near to Lamorna is the Merry Maidens stone circle. No huge chunks of stone here, the stones of the Merry Maidens are small affairs indeed when compared to Stonehenge or Avebury. But the place is well worth a visit and this day perhaps more than usually. I met up with father and daughter Eddie and Esther. Eddie was an academic who had worked on the Dragon Project, mapping ley lines and so on during the 1970s. He was talking to visitors and showing them how dowsing rods worked. They worked really well for me and using them I was able to tell where ley lines entered and left the stone circle and could find the seven circles of Power from the circle of stones to the centre of the circle. Ok... easy to be sceptical of this and I did find that small movements of the hands would make the rods swivel - but I even tried, without success, to make them swivel the wrong way on crossing a line. So I'm convinced but you make your own mind up. Fairly close by to the circle are two standing stones called The Pipers who were supposed to be playing for the ring of dancing girls who were turned to stone for dancing on a Sabbath. They would have had to be playing bloody loud to be heard from where they are...

Eddie had given me a rough-drawn map of the area showing the circle, the standing stones, a tumulus and this ancient cross which I found roughly halfway from the circle to the standing stones, at the edge of a field against the hedgerow. It's name is Nûn Carey.

Return to Cornwall 1989 Index Page

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?

Return to Cornwall 1996 Holiday Index