Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, Second SeriesBottrell, William
General
Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, Second Series
Bottrell, William
Cornwall (England : County) -- Social life and customs; Legends -- England -- Cornwall (County)
The aperture in both these stones (about six inches in diameter)
is too small to pop the smallest, or all but the smallest, baby
through; yet the people call them crick stones, and maintain
that they were so-called before they were born. Crick stones
were used for dragging people through, to cure them of various
diseases. As these holed stones at Boleigh have been removed
from their original site no satisfactory conclusion can be arrived
at as to their primitive use. Some have thought that these stones,
in common with the men-an-tol at Lanyon, the tolmen in
Constantine, and many others, might have served the same
important purpose as the menheres—to fix the proper time for
the celebration of the autumnal equinox, by the stones being so
placed that the sacred index of the seasons on rising above the[32]
horizon would be seen through the perforation, at a right angle to
the face of the stone, and that the triangular head of the stone
formed such an angle that when the sun was on the meridian,
(at certain periods of the year, which were required to be known,)
its altitude would denote the time, by its place in the heavens
being in a line with the slope of the primitive time-piece, which
would then cast no shadow on the ground at mid-day. If these
monuments were intended for stone calendars, and any can be
found in their original position, it might be possible, at least
approximately, to fix the time of their erection, by their present
variation from true east and west. If the deviation is in the
direction demanded by the precession of the equinoxial points, the
difference might be calculated at the allowed rate of fifty seconds
a year. There is but little doubt but the men-an-tol still remains
where it was first erected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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