The hills and moorland of this district are scarred with old workings and abandoned mine buildings. Rugged Carn Brea, crowned by prehistoric remains and the ruins of an ancient castle, rises 740 feet high, close by the main line between Redruth and Camborne. Here, they say, was the chief centre of Druid worship in the west. This district is easy of access from St. Ives, Penzance, Falmouth or Truro, and a visit to it will ever be remembered with pleasure, bleak and dreary though the mine riddled land may seem at first sight. [Illustration: _Carn Brea._] [Illustration: A young woman sitting on rocks with and consoling an elderly person.] THE LEGEND OF THE FOUR HALLS. Many an old tale is told of that great waste of sand-hills which fringes the coast of Perran Bay between Newquay and Perranporth. They say that there stood the lost city of Langarrow, once a busy town, that became so wicked that it was swallowed up in a night of fierce storm by the sands, and no trace of it left to offend the earth. Right on the very edge of these sands, in the parish of Cubert, is the hamlet of Ellenglaze. Hellenclose was its old name, and that means the “Four Halls.” There is a little known story about this place, or rather about the house that stood there in the very old days, and it explains why the place was so called. Hellenclose was once much nearer to the sea, but three times the relentless sands overwhelmed it, and each time the Lord of Hellenclose set himself to erect a new dwelling further inland, for they were of a stubborn race in those days, and would not easily submit even to the power of the storms and the winds. It was a young Lord who built the fourth hall, in defiance of all advice, close by where the present house stands. Wise men warned him that the same fate would befall that as had overtaken the others, but he laughed at them, and his house finished, he rode off to fetch his bride from Meneage by the Lizard. The night he returned was an ominous one. A great gale was getting up, and the retainers eyed anxiously the restless sand-hills not so far away. But the young Lord was happy and careless and bade his people sleep soundly for no harm would come. But the next morning the invading sands were seen approaching, and panic fell upon the household, who cried out that there was a curse upon the land. Presently they dragged to the anxious Lord and his new-made wife an old hag whom they had found hiding in a barn. She was a witch they said, and to her was due all their troubles. By this time the cruel sand was already sweeping around the walls of the house, and the young Lord in his trouble gave orders for the hag to be hanged forthwith, saying that she should not live to cackle over the result of her evil designs. But his beautiful young bride intervened.