Footprints of Former Men in Far CornwallHawker, Robert Stephen
History
Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall
Hawker, Robert Stephen
Cornwall (England : County) -- History
Passing onward, the traveller will pause amid a winding outline of
unhewn granite pillars, and he will gradually discover that these
are set up to represent the coils of a gigantic serpent, traced,
as it were, in stone. This is a memorial of the dragon-crest of a
Viking, or the demon-idol and shrine of an older antiquity. Not far
off there gleams a moorland lake or mimic sea, with its rippling laugh
of waters--the Dozmere Pool[68] of many an antique legend and tale,
the mystic scene[69] of the shadowy vessel and the Mort d’Arthur of
our living bard. A sheep-track--for no other visible path will render
guidance along the moor--leads on to Kilmarth Tor, from the brow of
which lofty crag the eye can embrace the expanse of the two seas which
are the boundaries of Cornwall on the right and left. There, too, looms
in the distance rocky Carradon, with the valley of the Hurlers at its
foot. These tall shapes of granite, grim and grotesque, were once,
as local legends say, nine bold upstanding Cornish men who disdained
the Sabbath-day; and as they pursued their daring pastime and “put
the stone” in spite of the warning of the priest, they were changed,
by a sudden doom, where they stood up to play, and so were fixed for
ever in monumental rock. Above them lowers the Devil’s Wring, a pile
of granite masses, lifted, as though by giant or demon strength, one
upon another; but the upper rocks vast and unwieldy, and the lower
gradually lessening downward, until they rest, poised, on a pivot of
stone so slender and small that it seems as though the wind sweeping
over the moor would overtopple it with a breath; and yet centuries
many and long have rolled over the heath, and still it stands unshaken
and unswerved. Its name is derived from the similitude of the rocky
structure to the press wherein the ancient housewives of rude Cornwall
were accustomed to “wring” out the milk from their cheese.
[Illustration: THE CHEESEWRING (or The Devil’s Wring).]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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