The Land's End District; its antiquities, natural history, natural phenomena and scenery: also, a brief memoir of B. Trevithick. With a map, etc

Front matter

THE LAND'S END DISTRICT ITS ANTIQUITIES, NATURAL HISTORY, NATURAL PHENOMENA AND SCENERY. ALSO, A BRIEF MEMOIR OF RICHARD TREVITHICK, C. E. BY RICHARD EDMONDS, (Late of Penzance), SECRETABY TOE COENWAIX TO THE CAMBEIAH ABCHÆOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION. WITH A MAP, SIX PLATES, AND SEVERAL WOODCUTS. LONDON: J. RUSSELL SMITH, 36, SOHO SQUARE. PENZANCE:— F. T. VIBERT. 1862. TO HER MAJESTY QUEEN VICTORIA. Do Thou the waves —do Thou the nations — rule ! And let thy sceptre be the suasive power Of an unselfish godlike policy — Doing towards all other realms as Thou Would'st have all other realms to do t'wards Thee While thine own people love thy righteous sway, And feel thy service perfect liberty. Thus shall the praise of all the wise and good Throughout the world, continue to be thine, And God, thy God, shall bless Thee evermore. R. E

Preface

. The first seventy-five pages are a reprint of my Papers on the Antiquities of the District, in the Archæologist Cambr ensis for 1857 and 1858. The next ninety pages treat of extraordinary agitations of the sea, earthquakes, whirlwinds, storms, effects of lightning, auroras, calling of the sea, remarkable meteo rological facts, sand hillocks with imbedded land shells, and other interesting natural phenomena — which I have also described in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, the British Association Reports, and the Trans actions of the Royal Societies of Cornwall. The succeeding ninety pages (161-253) are occupied with a tour round the district, and contain accounts of Penzance and its climate and early crops, St. Michael's Mount, ancient crosses, the fisheries, luminosity of the sea, submarine forests, cliff caverns, boulders, raised beaches, the Armed Knight, remarkable intermixtures of granite and slate, lighthouses, submarine mines, con templated breakwaters, Sir Humphry Davy, Richard Trewavas, the Monks of St. Matthew, the Cornish Chough, the recent monument to Dolly Pentreath, &c. &c. The brief memoir of Trevithick I published in the Edinburgh Neiv Philosophical Journal for October, 1859.

The subjects are thus evidently of general interest, although arising from one locality. THE AUTHOR, 2, Portland Terrace, Plymouth, July, 1862. THE CELTIC AND OTHER ANTIQUITIES OF THE LAND'S END DISTEICT OF CORNWALL. THE CELTIC AND OTHER ANTIQUITIES OF THE LAND'S END DISTRICT OF CORNWALL. " The various castles, circles, cromlehs and primitive customs still existing in this part of the island are objects of peculiar curiosity to every person who is zealous in the cause of British Antiquity." — Britton and Brayley's England and Wales, ii. p. 501.

Chapter I

Introduction — the District defined — the Cornish Language last Spohen here — Character — Density qf its Population, Ancient and Modern — St. Michael's Mount, the Ancient Iktin — Origin qf the Names Iktin and Britain — Frequented by the Tyrians — Remains qf an Ancient Bronze Furnace, used probably for Melting Tin — " Jews' Houses " for Smelting Tin — Similarity qf Ancient and Modern Processes qf Smelting and Melting — Origin of the Name Marazion — the Period when the Phœnicians first visited Mount's Bay— Ancient Bronze Image. Having at the request of the Cambrian Archæological Association accepted its Corresponding Secretaryship for Cornwall, it becomes my duty, in the silence of abler writers, to describe the antiquities of the very small peninsular district (wherein I reside) which forms the south-western extremity of Cornwall, and is so nearly an island, that the distance between the highest tide in Mount's Bay on the south, and that in the estuary of St. Ives Bay on the north, is only three miles.

This district is probably more remarkable for the variety of its prehistoric remains than any other of equal extent in Great Britain. The Cornish language, which, like the Welsh, was a dialect of the Celtic, has long ceased to be spoken, although, in the conversation of the rural population, there is still a very considerable sprinkling of Cornish words quite unintelligible to strangers. The last survivor of those who had in their youth been accustomed to converse in pure Cornish appears to have been Dolly y* Pentreath, of Mousehole, near Penzance, who died in 1778, aged 102 years. The parishes in Cornwall in which it was commonly spoken, up to the commencement of the last century, were exclusively those along the coasts of Mount's Bay and St. Ives Bay, and the few others in this district west of these bays.1 As this district thus retained the ancient language later than any other part of the county, a glance at its present population will be interesting, as indicating in some degree the character of its ancient inhabitants.

" Trained from youth (says a writer in the Edinburgh Review, for January, 1851) in employments requiring much mental exertion, and dependent for subsistence not on mere wages, or the mere produce of a narrow parcel of soil, but on branches of active industry, where he himself shares in the responsibility, profit and loss ; acquiring, by daily practice, habits at once of the boldest speculation, and the most minute and calculating forethought, the miner, fisherman, or small tradesman of West Cornwall not only exhibits powers, not often developed else where in his rank of life, but influences also by his example the general tone of feeling among the labouring classes. Their fishermen range the whole coast of the south of England, and have turned the seas of Ireland, neglected by its inhabitants, into preserves of their own ; their miners disinter the hidden wealth of Brazil and Australia." — p. 90.

And Warner, in his Tour through Cornwall, in 1808, says, " its men are sturdy, bold, honest and sagacious ; its women lovely and modest, courteous and unaffected." 1 Lhuyd's Archæologia Britannica, .... from Collections and Observations in Travels thro' Wales, Cornwall, Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland, 1707, p. 253. Much of what remains of the Cornish language may be found in the work now referred to ; and in Dr. Pryce's Cornish Grammar, and Cornish-English Vocabulary, with an Appendix containing " The Lord's Prayer, the Belief, and the Commandments, in the ancient and modern Cornish, and a collection of Proverbs, Mottoes, Rhymes, Songs, &c, in the modern or vulgar Cornish," 1790; and in Davies Gilbert's edition, in 1827, of the ancient Cornish drama, entitled The Creation of the World with Noah's Flood, written a.d. 1611, to which are added the first chapter of Genesis, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Command ments, dialogues, proverbs, numerals, &c, in most of which the Cornish ancl thc English are on opposite pages. — p. 348.

Mr. W. Wilkie Collins, too, after walking along the coasts of this peninsula in 1851, speaks in the most laudatory terms of the contented, kind, generous and hospitable dispositions and social virtues of the in habitants.2 And the opinion of a still more recent tourist is equally in their praise.3 These disinterested testimonies agree with what was recorded by Diodorus Siculus nineteen hundred years ago, who, after praising the British generally for their sin cerity, integrity, and contented dispositions, says that the inhabitants of this district " excel in hospitality," and "are civilized in their mode of life."* The cause of this similarity of character between the ancient and the modern population is easily explained. The same mild climate, the same fertile fields producing two crops in the year, (as mentioned by Diodorus,5) the same mining, fishing, agricultural and mercantile employments, carried on principally by numerous small capitalists on their own resources ; in short, the same causes which concurred anciently to raise the inhabitants of Mount's Bay in civi lization, talents and courteous deportment above their fellow Cornishmen, have continued to maintain them in their relative superiority.

The ancient population, too, appears to have been, like the modern, considerably more dense than that of the rest of Cornwall. Its great density in very ancient times is evident, not only from the very numerous remains of ancient British towns, villages, huts and sepulchral barrows, still to be seen on our waste grounds, but also from the vast quantities of half-calcined human remains, mixed with charcoal, that have been, and are still being, in numberless places disturbed by the plough and new buildings. In modern times the parish of Madron, which includes Penzance, was the most populous parish in Cornwall in 1801, 1821 and 1841 ; the most populous 2 Rambles beyond Railways, pp. 91, 92. 3 Cornwall, its Mines and Miners, 1855, p. 272. 4 The whole passage will be presently quoted. 6 See the quotation in the next Chapter. parishes in 1811, 1831 and 1851, having been, respectively, St. Austell, Redruth and Camborne, the central towns of the three great mining districts of Cornwall.

The hundred of Penwith, in which the Land's End district is situated, is by far the most populous of the nine Cornish hundreds. Of all places in this British Cliersonesus, the most remarkable in ancient and modern times is St. Michael's Mount, the Iktin of Diodorus, and the earliest British port known in history. This natural pyramid of rocks — an island two-thirds of the day, and a quarter of a mile from the ancient town of Marazion — is, with its pier for ships, about a mile in circumference, and the aged and the young, the educated and the uneducated, the English man and the foreigner, all regard it as one of the most strikingly sublime and beautiful objects they have ever beheld ; to which universal effect produced by its appear ance, if we add the associations connected with it as a high place of druidical worship, and the great resort of the Phœnicians many centuries before the Christian era, and as having been in less ancient periods one of the most famous religious places in Europe, until its monastery and nunnery were converted into a military garrison, we need not wonder at the universal admiration it has obtained.6 That " the Mount" should, therefore, have given its name to [the bay which encloses it, is what every one would have expected ; and it has in all probability given its name also to the most distinguished country on the globe, as I will now proceed to show.

The following is a literal translation of the passage in Diodorus Siculus, which describes the inhabitants of the Land's End district, and the manner in which the tin was obtained, prepared and exported, forty or fifty years before the commencement of our era : — " The inhabitants of that extremity of Britain which is called Belerion,7 both excel in hospitality, and also by reason of their 6 Yet no British sovereign appeal's to have visited it until the 6th of September, 1846, when Her Majesty Queen Victoria landed there. ? This name (as a friend suggested to me) may have been derived intercourse with foreign merchants are civilized in their mode of life. These prepare the tin, working very skilfully the earth which produces it. The ground is rocky, but has in it earthy veins the produce of which is wrought down, and melted, and purified.

Then, when they have cast it into the form of cubes (or dice, aen-payaXwv pvdfiove) they carry it into a certain island adjoining to Britain, and called Iktis (ncng).8 For during the recess of the tide the intervening space is left dry, and they carry over abundance of tin to this place in their carts. And it is some thing peculiar that happens to the islands in these parts lying between Europe and Britain ; for at the full tide, the intervening passage being overflowed, they appear islands, but when the sea retires a large space is left dry, and they are seen as peninsulas. From hence, then, the traders purchase the tin of the natives, and transport it into Gaul, and finally travelling through Gaul on foot, in about thirty days they bring their burdens on horses to the mouth of the river Rhone."9 — (Book v.) The British isle here referred to is now generally allowed to be St. Michael's Mount.1 Indeed there is no other in Cornwall, or Britain, that corresponds with the description of the Greek historian.2 But Diodorus calls it Iktin, not Iktis.

All his translators, however, French and English, as well as Latin, finding the word in the accusative case, concluded Iktis to be the nominative, and therefore called it Iktis, although Iktin (assuming it to be declinable) might be the nominative with quite as from the Phœnicians, whose god Bel, or Baal, the sun, (as will presently appear,) was very anciently worshipped here. 8 In the original it is, " etc rrfv vrjaov 7rpoKeifi.i.vr}v ficv rrje fiperraviicrje orofia^Ofievrjv ce \ktiv. 9 Dr. Barham, Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, iii. p. 88. 1 See Sir H. de la Beche's Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset, p. 524. See also the papers of Mr. Carne on the " Geology of the Scilly Isles," in the Cornwall Geological Transactions, ii. p. 357, and vii. p. 153, in which he clearly shows that the tin of the Cassiterides could not have been the product of the Scilly Islands, as Borlase imagined. 2 Those who once contended that the Isle of Wight is the Iktin, or Ictis, of Diodorus, referred to some unfounded traditions that, in his time, that isle was accessible from the mainland by carts at low water, and that the Mount was not ; whereas both places in all probability are now just as they were in the time of Noah. — See Warner's Cornwall, p. 262. much propriety as Iktis.

That Iktin was the original name of the Mount, as recorded by Diodorus, receives confirmation from the fact of its most ancient name, after it became a religious cell, being Dinsell, or Dynsull,3 a mere abbreviation, apparently, of Iktincell into 'Tincell, T and D being interchangeable letters. Iktin being thus evidently the ancient name of the Mount, let us dwell for a moment on its etymology, and on that of another name very dear to us. Ik is the Cornish word for " cove," or " port." Iktin, therefore, signifies "port-tin," or "tin-port,"4 a name as appro priate, and at the same time as indefinite, as could have been adopted by the Phœnicians, who, as is well known, sought to conceal the place whence they procured their tin. So, too, with respect to the name JBretin, (pro nounced by the French, Bretagne; and by the English, Britain,) as bri is the Cornish word for " mount," Bre-tin signifies " tin-mount," just as Iktin signifies " tin-port," and conveyed to strangers, and even to the Britons them selves who did not dwell in Cornwall, no more idea of the locality of this mount, than did the name " Tin Islands," (Cassiterides,) used by Herodotus four hundred years before Diodorus.

Thus the country, as well as the mount from which the tin was shipped, appears to have derived its name very naturally from its chief export.5 Dr. Maton, reversing this idea, suggested that the word tin might possibly have been derived from the original name of the 3 Carew's Survey of Cornwall. Edition by Lord de Dunstanville, p. 376. 4 The Cornish word porth is almost synonymous with ih, and generally precedes the word to which it is joined, as in the names Porth-towan, and Porth-leven ; but it sometimes succeeds it, as in Perran-porth. 5 The name by which tin was known amongst the Phœnicians and Chaldeans has undergone considerable changes since its introduction into European languages. While the Saxon, Dutch and Danish word for tin is the same as our own, the Swedish word is tenn, the German zinn, the French etain, the Latin stannum, the Irish stan, the Cornish stean, the Armoric stean, and also staen ; the letter S in the last four words being probably a mere prefix, as in the modern word sneeze for neeze. — See Job xii. 18.

Mount from which it was anciently shipped, that name being Iktin of British origin, and " having no connection with the accusative case of the Greek language."6 It is true that in the Cornish language the word tin is some times used as identical with din, " a fortress," but it must also have been used by the Cornish for the metal of that name; for if tin, as is generally supposed, be the ancient Phœnician word for that substance, it could not but have been communicated to the Cornish. It may be inferred, from the passage above cited, that the spot where the tin was cast into the form of cubes, before its conveyance to the Mount, was very near the Mount. Now the place nearest the Mount is Marazion, and at the mouth of the stream which forms the western boundary of that town, traces of a very ancient building, apparently used for both smelting and melting tin, have been discovered.

In 1849 the stream, having been diverted, flowed westward along the base of the adjoining sand hillock, undermining and washing away large portions. In sections thus made, I saw, at the depth of between three and six yards beneath the surface, the remains of ancient walls, rudely built of unhewn stones, with clay, and near them great quantities of ashes, charcoal, and slag, besides some ancient broken pottery of very rude manufacture, and much brick. In removing a portion of the sand within a few inches of one of the walls, my nephew (Frederic Bernard Edmonds) and myself discovered two fragments of a bronze vessel resting on charcoal, a considerable portion of which had combined with the copper during the lapse of ages, and a beautiful green substance had resulted — the carbonate of copper.

The fragments were each about six inches long, four wide, and only the sixteenth of an inch thick, having been apparently parts of the circular top of a vessel three feet in diameter, the mouth being bent back into a horizontal rim three-quarters of an inch broad. No charcoal was on the insides of the fragments, but « Maton's Western Counties (1797), i. p. 205. p. their outsides were completely blackened and covered with it. Professor Hunt, at whose request I presented one of the fragments to the Museum of Economic Geology, kindly analyzed a small portion, the following being the result : — Weight before analysis, 25 grains Grains. Copper 18'0 Tin 225 Iron 1-0 Loss as carbonic acid and oxygen, the copper being partially in the state of carbonate, and much of the tin in oxide 30 Earthy matter 075 25 These very ancient ruins, therefore, with the fragments of a bronze furnace, and the abundance of ashes, charcoal and slag, all covered with the sands of many centuries, seem to indicate the very spot where, as Diodorus relates, the tin was cast into cubic forms, previous to its con veyance in carts to the neighbouring island during the recesses of the tide.

The bronze furnace was, I conclude, brought hither by the Phœnicians, for no copper was then raised in Corn wall ; and Strabo mentions that the Phœnicians furnished us with earthenware, salt, and copper or bronze utensils (xaXi:w nara1') in exchange for our tin, lead and hides. We also learn from Cæsar that the copper, or bronze, used by the Britons was imported (cere utuntur importato).8 It will be interesting now to inquire for what particular purpose this very ancient bronze furnace was used. It appears from the passage quoted that the tin underwent two distinct fusions, — first, for purification ; secondly, for being cast into the form of cubes ; and for this latter purpose the bronze furnace may have been used by the merchants after they had purchased the metal, the fire t Geograph. lib. iii. s. 8.

See Ezra viii. 27, and Ezekiel xxvii. 13. 8 De Bello Gallico, lib. v. s. 10. in this process being applied exclusively to the exterior of the vessel ; whereas the method of smelting for purifi cation by the native miners was, according to Pryce, " to dig a hole in the ground, and throw the tin ore on a charcoal fire, which probably was excited by a bellows."9 Many such rude pits containing smelted tin have been discovered in this district, and are called Jeios' Houses,1 there being a tradition that our tin mines were in very remote periods " wrought by the Jews, with pickaxes of holm, box and hartshorn," tools frequently " found amongst the rubble of such works."2 But as soon as the natives had acquired the art of mining, the Jews may have purchased the smelted metal from them, and, after having cast it into forms most convenient for exportation, conveyed it to the Mount.

Here it is worthy of remark that the two different fusions to which the tin was thus subjected in the most ancient times — the one for purifi cation, the other for being cast into particular forms for exportation — are continued to the present day, and not only so, but the different methods of conducting the pro cesses are the same now as they were at first, so far, at least, as that the metal is in contact with the fire in the purifying or smelting process, and not so in the other. Both processes may be seen in operation at Messrs. Bolitho's smelting house and melting house at Chyan dour, adjoining Penzance, and the diameter of the iron furnace employed in the latter house is very nearly the same as was that of the bronze vessel, of which the frag ments have been described. In the preceding paragraph I have assumed, agreeably to the commonly received opinion, that " Jews, as well as Phœnicians, were very ancient traders in Phœnician ships;"3 and some of them, as far back as the time of Solomon, may have become resident here after the ex- 9 Mineralogia Coruubiensis, p. 281. 1 Transactions ofthe Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, vi. p. 43. - Carew's Survey of Cornwall.

Edition by Lord de Dunstanville, p. 26. 3 Scawen, quoted in Buller's St. Just, p. 5. ample ofthe Phœnicians, who are recorded by Thucydides to have " had settlements all round the coast of Sicily," and to have " secured the capes on the sea, and the small circumjacent islands, for the purpose of trafficking with the natives."4 Indeed, if the Jews who traded here had no resident merchants to purchase and secure the tin, in order to its shipment immediately on the arrival of the Mediterranean ships, great delay and inconvenience would have resulted. Until recently the Cornish tin trade, from the very commencement of its authentic history, has been in the hands of the Jews. St. Michael's Mount, the supposed residence of the Jewish merchants, was by nature far the strongest of all the numerous fortified places in Cornwall, and therefore a very safe depot for the metal until the ships came to export it.

It was also an exceedingly well sheltered and very accessible sea-port, where vessels might come in and be laden almost any day of the year.5 From this im pregnable fortress the tin merchants appear to have come to the mainland to make their purchases from the natives, as I gather from the passage I have quoted. Now, that part of the mainland nearest the Mount, where in all probability the natives held their tin market, is the spot on which stands the very ancient town of Marazion, all the various names of which record the fact of its having been a market. In Doomsday Roll it is called Tre maras-tol, "the cell, or hole, market-town;" tre being the Cornish for " town ;" maras, a contraction of marghas, " a market ;" and tol, " a hole, or cell," denoting the religious house on the Mount, to which the town anciently belonged, but which is now included in the chapelry of Marazion.

The only name by which it is called in its 4 Book vi. quoted in Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Corn^ail^hi. p. 120. 5 These two rSSsons for conveying the tin to the Mount, for safe custody and for exportation — reasons very obvious to all acquainted with the locality — were not noticed by Diodorus. Had they been taken into consideration by those who formerly denied that the Mount was the ancient Iktin, much inkshed might have been saved. charter of incorporation, granted in the 37th of Elizabeth, is Marghasiewe ; whereas, singularly enough, the only name on its ancient and present town seal is Marghasion. The name Marghasiewe is now never used, having been supplanted by that of Market-Jew ; and the street in Penzance which leads to Marazion has therefore been always called " Market-Jew Street."

Numerous have been the conjectures of antiquaries respecting the origin of the names of this town. Pryce, in his Vocabulary, says that " Market-Jew " and " Marazion " signify " the market on the sea-coast;" but, in his Cornish Grammar, (the preceding part of the same volume,) I find that ion and iou are two of the different terminations of Cornish plural nouns ; so that marghas-ion, and marghas-iewe, (which last four letters have nearly the same sound as iou,) are merely the different plurals of marghas, " a market." The subjoined is an engraving from an im pression from its ivory seal, which is probably more than 260 years old. The castle, or priory, with its portcullis down, indicates its connexion with St. Michael's Mount, Corporation Seal of Marazion. on which the castle stands. The inscription around it is " SIGILL .

MAIORIS . VILLE . ET . BOROV . DE . MARGHASION."6 6 Marazion (considering the Mount as part of it) may be the most ancient town in Britain (See Davies Gilbert's Cornwall, ii. p. 215) ; and my father, its town clerk, appointed in 1805, and now in his eighty-fourth year, may be the senior town clerk in Britain, having been also, for many years, the senior practising solicitor in Cornwall. The period when Mount's Bay was first visited by the Phœnicians, and ever since which it, or the adjoining bay of Falmouth, has been the chief place in all the world for the export of tin, is supposed to be more than 3,000 years ago ;7 for the tin, so common in Palestine8 in the time of Moses, was not dug from that land, but imported by the Tyrians from some remote islands known only to themselves, respecting which Herodotus, after acknow ledging bis ignorance of their situation, says, " it is nevertheless certain that our tin is brought from those extreme regions."9 These islands are now allowed to be the British islands, of which the only part ever distinguished for its export of tin is Cornwall.

The remains above described of an ancient bronze furnace are not the only supposed Phœnician remains that have been found in this district. A bronze image was discovered in pulling down an old stone wall in St. Just Vicarage in 1832, and presented by the Vicar to the Royal Institution of Cornwall, whose Secretary, Dr. C. Barham, in reply to an elaborate disquisition thereon by Mr. Birch, of the British Museum, has satisfactorily shown that it was probably lost by some Tyrian merchant in the tin district where it was found.1 7 See Dr. Stukeley's Stonehenge, p. 32, and Woodley's Scilly Isles, p. 23, and Mr. John Hawkins, Transactions of the Royal Cornwall Geological Society, iii. pp. 115, 117, 120. 8 Numbers xxxi. 22. Isaiah i. 25 and 23, i. 7, 8. Ezekiel xxvii. 3, 12. 9 Beloe's Translation, i. p. 317. 1 Report of the Royal Institution of Cornwall for 1850, p. 47, in which, as well as in No. 25 of the Journal qf the Archæological Institute, and in Buller's St. Just, p. 6, is a figure of the image. nUTL-curu to(, fiaVumr ut, JuMm JJsLpÆeuj&. efc-

Chapter II

" Druidical Temples," or Circles each qf Nineteen Stones — Dawns Myin, and Pillars near it — Boscawen-un, and Pillar within it, with three other Pillars in a straight line from it — Tregeseal, and Holed Stones — Boskednan, and Men-an-tol, or Annular Stone — Extract from Diodorus referring to the Climate of Mount's Bay, and to the Worship of Apollo, or the Sun, in this Country — 'the Metonic Cycle of Nineteen Years known in Britain centuries before Meton lived. From what has been said in the preceding Chapter, it will be expected that some of the antiquities of this district belong to an exceedingly remote period. In describing them I will begin with the " Druidical Temples," erected, probably, ages before that of Stonehenge. These con sisted originally of nineteen detached stones, or unhewn pillars, placed upright from 3 to 5 feet above ground, in rude circles varying in diameter from 65 to 80 feet.

The name b}r which they are vulgarly known is " nine maidens," an abbreviation, doubtless, for " nineteen maidens." Borlase has noticed four of these within 5| miles of Penzance, all still to be seen, viz., those of Dawns Myin, Boscawen-un, Tregeseal and Boskednan.2 I. — The southernmost, Dawns Myin,3 is 4^ miles (by the map) south-west-by-south from the centre of Pen zance, in a field of Rosemodris, in St. Buryan. Fig. 1 of plate I. is a correct representation of it, together with the public footpath by which it is traversed ; in the distance are seen the church of the deanery of St. Buryan, endowed by King Athelstane, and the very abrupt hill of Chapel Carn Bre, crowned with an ancient oratory now in ruins. Three of its nineteen stones have fallen. The distances between those standing are generally about 11 or 12 feet, measuring from the centre of one stone to the 2 Antiq. p. 181.

Borlase imagined that the number nineteen re ferred to the twelve months and the seven days of the week. 3 Myin is the plural of maen, or men, " stone." Dawns signifies " dance." The legend is that these were nineteen maidens changed into stones for dancing on Sunday. centre of the next ; two of the intervals are nearly 1 4 feet each, and one nearly 21 feet. Two furlongs west of this temple is a large unhewn pillar 10 feet above ground ; and about the same distance north-east-by-north of the circle are two very large unhewn pillars, called the Pipers,* the one 15, and the other 13 feet above ground, and 100 yards apart. The Piper farthest from the temple is half way between it and an ancient cave called the Fougou, (to be described in a subsequent Chapter,) the circle, the two pipers, and the cave, being all very nearly in the same straight line.