A book of the west. Volume 2, Cornwall : $b being an introduction to Devon and CornwallBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A book of the west. Volume 2, Cornwall : $b being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Cornwall (England : County)
Brown Willy and Rough Tor are fine hills rising out of really ghastly
bogs, Crowdy and Stannon and Rough Tor marshes, worse than anything
of the sort on Dartmoor, places to which you hardly desire to consign
your worst enemies, always excepting promoters of certain companies. I
really should enjoy seeing them flounder there.
Brown Willy (_bryn geled_ = conspicuous hill) has five heads, and these
are crowned with cairns.
Owing mainly to the remoteness of this mountain from the habitations
of men, and from the mischievous activity of stone quarriers for
buildings, there are scattered about this stately five-pointed tor
some very interesting relics of antiquity, of an antiquity that goes
back to prehistoric times. Among these most interesting of all are the
beehive huts that cluster about the granite rocks like the mud nests of
swallows.
The whole of the Cornish moors, like Dartmoor, are strewn with
prehistoric villages and towns of circular houses, sometimes within
rings of rude walling that served as a protection to the settlement,
and connected with enclosures for the cattle against wolves. But though
in many cases the doorways remain, of upright jambs with a rude lintel
of granite thrown across, complete examples roofed in are rare, and
those to which we direct attention now are known to very few persons
indeed. The huts in question measure internally from six to eight
feet in diameter; the walls are composed of moorstones rudely laid in
courses, without having been touched by any tool or bedded in mortar.
The walls are some two to three feet thick. Sometimes they are formed
of two concentric rings of stones set upright in the ground, filled in
between with smaller stones, but such huts were never stone-roofed.
Beehive-roofed they were, but with their dome formed of oak boughs
brought together in the centre, the ends resting on these walls, and
the whole thatched with straw or heather or fern. But the stone-built
and roofed huts have walls of granite blocks laid in courses, and after
five feet they are brought to dome over by the overlapping of the
coverers, in the primitive fashion that preceded the invention of the
arch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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