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
[Illustration: FIGS. 247 to 253.--Gaulish. From Akerman.]
[Illustration: FIGS. 254 and 255.--Gaulish. From Barthelemy.]
At Land's End, opposite the titanic headland known as Pardenick, or
Pradenic, is Cairn Voel which is also known locally as "The Diamond
Horse":[446] there is likewise a headland called The Horse, near Kynance
Cove, and a stupendous cliff-saddle at Zennor,[447] named the Horse's
Back. It would thus seem that the mythology of the Voel extended to the
far West, and it is not improbable that Tegid Voel, the Consort of
Keridwen the Mare, _alias_ Cendwen, meant _inter alia_ the Good Foal.
Prof. Macalister has recently hooked up from the deep waters of Irish
mythology a deity whose name Fal he connotes with a Teutonic Phol. This
Fal, a supposedly non-Aryan, neolithic (?) "pastoral horse-divinity,"
belonging to an older stratum of belief than the divine beings among the
Tuatha De Danann, Prof. Macalister associates with the famous stone of
Fal at Tara, and he remarks: "He looks like a Centaur, but is in
parentage and disposition totally different from the orthodox Centaurs.
He is, in fact, just the sort of being that would develop out of an
ancient hippanthropic deity who had originally no connection with
Centaurs, but who found himself among a people that had evolved the
conception of the normal type of those disagreeable creatures."[448]
In Cornwall is a river Fal; a _well_ is a spring, the _whale_ or
elephant of the sea was venerated because like the elephant it gushed
out a fountain of water from its head. The Wilton crescent, opposite one
of the ancient conduits by Rotten Row, Kensington, may well have meant
_Well town_, for the whole of this district was notoriously a place of
wells: not only do we find Wilton Crescent, but in the immediate
neighbourhood of Ovington Square and Flounders Field is _Walton_ Street
and Hooper's Court. Sennen Cove at Land's End was associated with a
mysterious sea-spirit known as the Hooper, and we shall meet again with
Hooper, or Jupiter, the Hidden one in "Hooper's Hide," an alternative
title for the game of Blind Man's Buff.
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