Archaic England : $b an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, place-names, and faerie superstitionsBayley, Harold
History
Archaic England : $b an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, place-names, and faerie superstitions
Bayley, Harold
Archaeology; England -- Antiquities
We are told that the first-comers in Crete ground their meal in stone
mortars, and that one of the peculiarities of the island was the
herring-bone design of their wall buildings. In West Cornwall the stone
walls or Giants' Hedges are Cyclopean; farther north, in the Boscastle
district, herring-bone walls are common, and in the neighbourhood of St.
Just there are numerous British villages wherein the stone mortars are
still standing.
The formula of independent evolution, which has recently been much
over-worked, is now waning into disfavour, and it is difficult to
believe otherwise than that identity of names, customs, and
characteristics imply either borrowing or descent from some common,
unknown source.
That the builders of our European tumuli and cromlechs were maritime
arrivals is a reasonable inference from the fact that dolmens and
cromlechs were built almost invariably near the sea.[20] These peculiar
and distinctive monuments are found chiefly along the _Western_ coasts
of Britain, the _Northern_ coast of Africa, in the isles of the
Mediterranean, in the isolated, storm-beaten Hebrides, and in the remote
islands of Asia and Polynesia.
By whom was the Titanic art of cromlech-building brought alike to the
British Isles and to the distant islands of the Pacific? By what
guidance did frail barques compass such terrifying sea space? How were
these adequately victualled for such voyages, and why were the mainlands
ever quitted? How and why were the colossal stones of Stonehenge brought
by ship from afar, floated down the broad waters of the prehistoric
Avon, and dragged laboriously over the heights of Oare Hill? Who were
the engineers who constructed artificial rocking stones and skilfully
poised them where they stand to-day? "To suspend a stupendous mass of
abnormous shape in such an equilibrium that it shall oscillate with the
most trivial force and not fall without the greatest, is a problem
unsolved so far as I know by modern engineers."[21]
Who were the indefatigable people who, prior to all record, reclaimed
the marshes of the Thames-mouth by an embankment which is intact to-day
all round the river coast of Kent and Essex? Who were the
horticulturists who evolved wheat and other cereals from unknown grasses
and certain lilies from their unknown wild? And who were the
philosophers who spun a delicate gossamer of fairy-tales over the world,
and formulated the cosmic ideas which are in many extraordinary respects
common alike to primitive and more advanced peoples? And why is the
symbol generally entitled the Swastika cross found not only under the
ruins of the most ancient Troy but also in the Thames at Battersea, and
elsewhere from China to Zimbabwe? How is it that Ireland, that remote
little outpost of Europe, possesses more Celtic MSS. than all the rest
of Celtic Europe put together?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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