Tuesday morning I had arranged a tour with a local astroarcheolgist who does walking tours of the ancient sites around Cornwall. She was very interesting to talk with, and very passionate about her work which always makes for a great guide.
We had an easy start to the morning and drove up to the Merry Maidens stone circle. It appears that Cornwall is littered with standing stones and they are along public foot paths and many are very easily accessible. The Merry Maidens are 19 stones standing in a circle in a field. Of course no one is exactly sure why they are there, but one antiquitarian claimed that on May Day if one stood at a single standing stone in a another field and looked at the circle, one could see the Pleiades rise above the centre stone. In her research my guide also went to the circle on May Day for sunrise. She said at first looking at the sun rise through the stones, nothing special jumped out, but as she walked around to the top and looked back down the hill, the shadows of the stones reached out and crossed each other in seemingly deliberate patterns.
We carried on down the lane a short way where there was a Neolithic Entrance Tomb along side the road way that had survived, though had been dug out by the Victorian Antiquitarians. And across the way in the field was a single tall standing stone that appeared to be looking towards the Maidens and could easily be connected to them.
Back in the car we drove along to Boscawen-un, another stone circle. This one is a little more off the path and very popular with locals and pagans who still visit frequently. More mystery here of course, with a slanting oblong stone in the middle. As well all of the 19 circle stones were of the local granite - except one. The stone that appears to be opposite the entry way is made of quartz.
The next stop was only about a mile away if one hikes, by car it was a bit farther on winding Cornish country roads. At the top of a hill was Carn Euny which was a village that dates from the Roman era. There didn’t seem to be a lot of evidence of Roman occupation in Cornwall, one theory was that the Cornish had long been trading tin all over the world so was quite used to foreigners and just happily kept trading with the Romans. Which in turn led the Romans to leave them mostly alone to protect a status quo.
Carn Euny consists of a series of round houses, each with a front section and entry way where a family would have lived. It also has a Cornish Fougou, an underground passage and this side had a perfectly preserved underground beehive hut. It was amazing too that the stones had a bioluminescent moss that glittered with just a touch of light. The original entrance to the Fougou was a very small passage one would have had to squeeze through. It did have enlarged entrances as the medieval farm on the site used it for storage. There was also the remains of a very small farm house in the middle of the site.
Further up the path were the two wells on the site. The first we came to was scared to the pagans and likely used in the pre Christian era. After a dry spell it didn’t appear to have any water while we were there. Further up the path there was an Anglo-Saxon era church dedicated to the local St Euny that is mostly gone. The spring and the holy well remains and is a beautiful spot. The locals would often come to dunk their ill children or any “changelings” to request protection of the saint. It is still tradition for locals to come up on the saints day. Though no one ducks a child anymore. My guide says many will dunk a plushie to keep the tradition of requesting protection from the saint.
The next place we stopped was the oldest spot, some Neolithic standing stones that likely used to be another buried entrance tomb, with evidence of other smaller tombs around it (basically it sounds like there are tombs everywhere in Cornwall.) The three stones still stand together like an arch. Though they were replaced once, when 200 years ago they were struck by lightening and knocked down. The people came together to replace the stones, and carved 1824 on the side. The locals had a celebration last year for the 200th anniversary of the reconstruction. And in the hill in the distance is the remains of an old tin mine. It’s locally known as the Ding Dong Mine, as the local pastor complained that the “ding dong of the bells calling the miners to work were too noisy and people couldn’t hear the parish bells.”
The final stop on my tour was a walk along side farmers fields still lined with the medieval stone field boundaries and had a few ruined old farm houses. We walked up the path to the Men a Tol standing stones. Which translates to ‘Hole Stone’ because that’s all it is. Well, more than just that. It’s a circular stone with a good sized hole in the middle standing between two short standing stones. They say if you crawl through it can fix an aching back or a crick in the neck. While I was tempted to see if it would work after staying in slightly more basic accommodations, it can also help with woman getting pregnant. So I decided to skip crawling through and focused on just taking pictures!
My guide was lovely enough to drop me In Marazion on the way back. While I had seen most of what I had wanted to see, I calculated the out going tide to start revealing the causeway late in the day. I had regretted yesterday not getting pictures from the land side as the path was revealed. So today I slowly walked along the path with other collecting pictures as the waves dropped lower and lower. My trusty waterproof shoes worked very well, till I got a little lazy and stopped paying attention. Waterproof doesn’t help when the waves slosh over the top and down into the shoe. Sigh. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. I kept up my pictures and enjoyed chatting with the others on the path till the way cleared.
Then a bus back to Penzance, another nice dinner where I ended up chatting with a lovely lady who has spent the last 6 days walking the west coast trail. Though commiserating about sore legs is a little embarrassing when the other woman did so much more than you and is easily your mother’s age!
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