Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 3: Essays on Literature, Biography, and AntiquitiesMüller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Religion
Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 3: Essays on Literature, Biography, and Antiquities
Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max)
Comparative linguistics; Folklore; Literature -- History and criticism; Mythology; Religions
We can hardly hope that the wholesome superstition which prevented people
in former days from desecrating their ancient monuments will be any
protection to them much longer, though the following story shows that some
grains of the old leaven are still left in the Cornish mind. Near Carleen,
in Breage, an old cross has been removed from its place, and now does duty
as a gate-post. The farmer occupying the farm where the cross stood, set
his laborer to sink a pit in the required spot for the gate-post, but when
it was intimated that the cross standing at a little distance off was to
be erected therein, the man absolutely refused to have any hand in the
matter, not on account of the beautiful or the antique, but for fear of
the old people. Another farmer related that he had a neighbor who “haeled
down a lot of stoans called the Roundago, and sold ’em for building the
docks at Penzance. But not a penny of the money he got for ’em ever
prospered, and there wasn’t wan of the hosses that haeld ’em that lived
out the twelvemonth; and they do say that some of the stoans do weep
blood, but I don’t believe that.”
There are many antiquarians who affect to despise the rude architecture of
the Celts, nay, who would think the name of architecture disgraced if
applied to cromlechs and bee-hive huts. But even these will perhaps be
more willing to lend a helping hand in protecting the antiquities of
Cornwall when they hear that even ancient Norman masonry is no longer safe
in that country. An antiquarian writes to us from Cornwall: “I heard of
some farmers in Meneage (the Lizard district) who dragged down an ancient
well and rebuilt it. When called to task for it, they said, ‘The ould
thing was so shaky that a wasn’t fit to be seen, so we thought we’d putten
to rights and build’un up _fitty_.’ ”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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