The names of other remarkable features of the island, the great rocks
which are piled along its coasts, are all descriptive and not legendary
names--the Devil's Chimney, the Cheeses, the Templar's Rock, the
Gannett Rock, the Mousehole. These names will have been given in
comparatively recent times, at least since the Saxon invasion, for they
show a different mentality from the Celtic names which are found widely
in Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and Northumberland, and which have a poetic
and imaginative quality. Such is the difference between Heddon's
Mouth, "the Giant's Mouth," or Dunster, "the Tower on the Hill," and
such names as I have quoted above. The very name of Lundy itself,
which is "Lund-ei," the island of Lund, as Caldy is "Cald-ei," the
island of Cald, show a Teutonic origin, perhaps Scandinavian, but not
named so by the Celts of Britain or Ireland.
But "there were great men before Agamemnon"; certainly there were great
men on this island before the adventurer Lund landed upon it and gave
it his name.
In 1850, in digging foundations near a farmhouse in the southern part
of the island, a great grave, or series of graves, was discovered.
There were two stone coffins, made of hewn blocks of granite, just deep
enough to contain a body, and with the covers sloped and cut each from
a single block. One was ten feet in length, and contained the huge
skeleton of a man, over eight feet high; the other was eight feet long,
and contained a skeleton well over six feet, which "was imagined to be
that of a woman," but on what grounds I cannot discover, as it does not
seem to have been carefully examined, and is therefore probably mere
conjecture, based upon its juxtaposition to the larger coffin. In the
account of the excavation a "macabre" incident is recorded. One of the
workmen, seizing the shin-bone of the giant, placed it against his own
leg, and found that it reached halfway up his thigh; whereupon, taking
up the lower jawbone, he fitted it easily over his own lower jaw,
though he was a burly man and bearded.
"To what base uses a man may return, Horatio! . . ."
"Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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