Walpurgis Night

This night is called Walpurgis Night, and not unlike Hallowe'en, November Eve, which shared with May the first Celtic manifestations of evil, a night when strange things happen.

The 1st May marks the Celtic fire festival of Beltane, termed as one of the cross quarter days, marking the mid point in the sun's journey from the vernal equinox and the summer solstice and the termination of the dark half of the year. Beltane indicates the beginning of summer. In Celtic countries the earliest writings of the festival in the 10th Century Cormac's Glossary, record the driving of cattle through fires as an act of purification as they are released out to pasture for summer grazing.

From the Old Irish word Beltene meaning 'bright fire', the name of festival is likely derived from the Celtic deity Belenos, the 'shining one', often equated with Apollo in ancient Gaul and Britain, Apollo who carried a multitude of different Celtic names and epithets. The consort to Don in Welsh mythology, Beli Mawr (Beli the Great) is, ancestor deity of the Children of Don from the Mabinogion: Gwydion, Afallach, Caswallawn (the historical Cassivellaunus), Llefelys, Nudd/Lludd, Amaethon, and Gofannon and two daughters Penarddun, Arianrhod.

In ancient Ireland the main 'Bealtaine' fire was held on the central hill of Uisneach 'the Navel of Erin', the ritual centre of the country. In Irish mythology, the beginning of the summer season for the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Milesians started at Bealtaine. Great bonfires marking the time of purification and transition, heralding in the season in the hope of a good harvest later in the year, and were accompanied with ritual acts to protect the people from any harm by Otherworldly spirits. Like the opposite festival of Samhain on 31st October, (Hallowe'en), Beltane was an overnight festival commencing with the setting sun, when the veil between the living and the spirit world was at its thinnest and often breached.

Traditional May day celebrations include Morris Dancing, Jack-in-the-Green, Maypoles, May Queens, Greenmen and the Cornish 'Obby Oss', all centred on an ancient fertility rites and the arrival of the warming sun and the growing season. The earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian times, probably as solar celebrations at megalithic sites, later the Romans record the festival of Flora, Goddess of flowers, and the Walpurgis Night celebrations of the North European Germanic countries can be traced back to at least 2nd Century AD.
Maintaining the tradition over the overnight festival, Walpurgis Night is celebrated over the dark hours over-night of the last day of April to the first day of May in northern Europe and Scandinavia. Viking fertility celebrations took place at this time, when celebrations typically included the singing of traditional folk songs, the drinking of alcoholic sima, a type of sweet mead, and the lighting of bonfires. Today in Scandinavia it is one of the main holidays of the year in Sweden alongside Christmas and the Midsummer holiday. In Germany, the holiday is celebrated by dressing in costumes, playing practical jokes, and creating loud noises meant to scare away evil spirits. The festival of Walpurgis derived from ancient Pagan customs, where the arrival of spring is celebrated with bonfires at night, which became associated with Saint Walburga.

Walburga was born in Wessex, England, in 710 AD. She was the niece of Saint Boniface and, according to legend, a daughter to the Saxon prince St. Richard. Together with her brothers she travelled to Franconia, Germany, where she became a nun and lived in a convent in the German town of Heidenheim, where she presided over a community of monks and nuns, which was founded by her brother Wunibald. Walburga died on 25th February 779, her feast day in the Catholic calendar. However, it wasn't until 1st May of that year, that she was canonised as a saint, which became her feast day the Swedish calendar.

In German folklore, Walpurgisnacht (or Hexennacht, meaning Witches' Night), is the night when traditionally witches are said to join in large masses and meet on Brocken mountain, at 3,747 feet, the highest in the Harz Mountains of north central Germany, and celebrate their Gods and await the arrival of Spring with the coming May day dawn. Jacob Grimm, in his Teutonic Mythology (1888), said of the Brocken:

"There is a mountain very high and bare, whereon it is given out that witches hold their dance on Walpurgis Night............Our forefathers kept the beginning of May as a great festival, and it is still regarded as the trysting time of witches."

Sometimes shown on old maps as the Blocksberg, a terrain bearing witness to traditions dating from pre-Christian times, the Brocken beholds an eerie landscape of bizarre rock formations, craggy peaks, dark forests, and river valleys over-shadowed by towering cliffs; an atmosphere steeped in tales of witchcraft, magic, and ghostly apparitions; a landscape conjuring with legend to create a realm of bewitchment.

The phenomenon of the ghostly 'Brocken spectre' (German Brockengespenst), draws its name from the magnified shadow of an observer cast upon the upper surfaces of clouds opposite the sun, which can appear on any misty mountainside, but the frequent fogs and low-altitude accessibility of the Brocken, where it was first reported, has given the apparition its name.

On Walpurgis Night it is said that particular precaution must be taken against witches who may harm cattle. Holy bells are hung on the cows to scare away the witches, and they are guided to pasture by a goad which has been blessed. Stable doors should be secured and sealed with three crosses, sprigs of trees, once sacred to the pagan gods, like ash, hawthorn, juniper, and elder, once, are used as protection against the witches. Horseshoes should also be nailed on the threshold or over the door with prongs uppermost. Witches are but one of the many supernatural beings which are said to be active on May Eve. A superstition states, that if one wishes to see witches, one must put on his clothes in-side out, and creep backward to a crossroads on May Eve.

But why should a Christian Saint be associated with Walpurgis night, the Witches Sabbath?

A tradition recorded in The Book of Hallowe'en by Ruth Edna Kelley (1919) states that Saint Walburga was buried at Eichstatt, in Germany, where it is said a healing oil trickled from her rock-tomb. This miracle was reminiscent of the fruitful dew which fell from the manes of the Valkyries' horses, and as 1st May was not only Walburga's feast day but also the wedding-day of the goddess Holda, the people of the Norse countries thought of her as a Valkyrie, and subsequently identified her with Holda. The Valkyrie was a host of female figures who decide who will die in battle, named from the Old Norse 'valkyrja', literally "chooser of the slain", and escort slain warriors to Odin's hall Valhalla. And like the Valkyrie, Holda rode on her horse and scattered spring flowers and fruitful dew upon the fields and vales.

Holda or Holle is an ancient figure; the name cognate with Scandinavian beings known as the Huldra, in female form known as the Lady of the Forest, and the völva Huld, a seeress that practised seiðr magic. The name in the form Hludana is found in five Latin inscriptions dating from 197 AD- 235 AD. The legend of Holle is found as far as the Voigtland, past the Rhön mountains in northern Franconia, in the Wetterau up to the Westerwald and from Thuringia to the frontier of Lower Saxony; the same geographic area as Saint Walburga's religious influence.

Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology recorded a number of traditions concerning Frau Holda and Frau Holle, goddess of fertility, spinning, childbirth and domesticated animals, from western and central Germany, suggesting that this may be recollections of a local goddess of Germanic antiquity. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland there is much folklore about various supernatural female beings who helped women at their spinning. Some of these female beings were said to travel in wagons, or with ploughs, making journeys to bless the land. Frau Holda was said to go round each year and bring fruitfulness to the fields. If these supernatural beings needed assistance crossing water for example they would reward their helper with gold and in addition to being associated with the world of nature, agriculture and fertility, this group of supernatural beings encouraged spinning and were said to actually spin themselves. Frau Holle would even punish bad spinners by dirtying their distaffs and tangling their thread and her followers might whip anyone who disobeyed her rules by working on days when spinning was forbidden. In Christian times these days became linked with church festivals and spinning was forbidden on Saturday evenings.

Holda is first and foremost among the mythological spinners amongst the ancient deities. Throughout Northern Europe superstitions persisted around spinning; there were certain days around Christmastide when it was held to be unlucky to spin even after the traditions of a supernatural figure working on that day had been long forgotten. Memories of a supernatural being who taught spinning, weaving and assisted young girls can be found throughout fairy tales of the 19th Century.


However in Grimm's tale of Frau Holda the spindle is the magic link between the world of men and Holda's land. In the tale the requirement for girls to wet the spindle with blood and leap into the well has led to suggestions of an ancient shamanistic ritual for making contact with the goddess, requiring blood offerings applied to the goddess's symbol followed by trance in the sensation of falling. The importance of female magic in the Germanic tradition has maintained the connection between spinning and the supernatural and this persists in modern witchcraft.

In German folklore we find a little known local Goddess called Walpurga who seems to closely resemble the Scandinavian Goddess Holda. May Eve was originally dedicated to Walpurga, a fertility goddess of woods and springs. Germanic people called this day Walpurgisnacht, 'the night of Walpurga', after their fertility goddess and like Holda's association with the valkyries escorting the slain to the hall of Valhalla, Walpurga, Waluburg or Waelburga can also mean 'hall of the slain'. Interestingly, she shares many of Holda's attributes, including a propensity for rewarding human helpers with gifts of gold, and like Holda, Walpurga is also associated with spinning. Walpurga, again like Holda, went on to join the pagan entourage known as the Wild Hunt that swept through the sky on the eve of May first, and met afterwards on mountain-tops to sacrifice and worship their gods and made sacrifice for a bountiful harvest.

Despite many similarities, the Goddess Walpurga and Saint Walburga are entirely separate characters. Walburga became known as 'protectress of crops' perhaps betraying the entanglement with the goddess. Religious iconography often depicts the saint carrying a sheaf of grain, which is usually the pagan symbol of the fertility goddesses.

Under Christian influence from the eighth century, the 1st May became Saint Walburga's feast day, as was common practice by the church often covering ancient deities with a replacement saint figure in its attempts to suppress paganism and push the new religion on the old. Like the Goddess Brigid, the Church Fathers changed this goddess into a Saint and attached a similar legend to her origin.

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King Arthur's Hall Burns

Historic monument threatened by gorse fire

King Arthur's Hall, near St Breward, Cornwall, a Scheduled Ancient Monument, was threatened by the out break of a gorse fire on Tuesday, 20th April. The fire was thought to have started on the previous Sunday and had spread at least two miles across Bodmin Moor following tinderbox-dry conditions for the last month. The flames were said to be perilously close to the King Arthur's Hall, a megalithic monument thought to be an early Bronze Age ceremonial site.

King Arthur’s Hall, also known as Arthur’s Hunting Lodge, is situated in an area of open moorland, Arthur’s Downs, that extends north towards the settlements and ritual monuments of Louden Hill, eastwards towards Garrow Tor and south to Hawkstor. The date and purpose of the site remain obscure. The first reference to it is in a document dated 1584, at which time it had already enjoyed a long association with King Arthur who was reputed to have frequented the site. There is another Cornish site known as Arthur’s Hunting Lodge at Castle-an-Dinas, near St Columb, from which Arthur rode in the hunt on Tregoss Moor; a stone in St Columb bears the four footprints that his horse made whilst he was out hunting. Nearby on Bodmin Moor, in the parish of North-Hill, are other prehistoric sites bearing the names Arthur’s Bed, and near Trewortha Tor, Arthur’s Troughs, said to be where Arthur fed his hunting dogs as recorded by the 18th Century Cornish antiquarian, Dr William Borlase, who, in 1754, said of the site:

'Round Arthur's Bed, on a rocky Tor in the parish of North-hill, there are many [rock-basins], which the country people call Arthur's Troughs, in which he us'd to feed his Dogs.'

The name of Arthur is attached to a variety of landscape features; the original myth now lost to us, however, the concept persists of Arthur throughout British folklore as a figure who hunted in the wild, untamed, remote parts of the landscape.

The prehistoric rectangular banked enclosure of King Arthur’s Hall today consists of 56 stones which were originally thought to have stood upright, and possibly have numbered as many as 140, forming the internal face of a steep sided rectangular bank, around six feet high and some 160 feet by 65 feet. Many suggestions have been put forward for its origin and function, ranging from a Neolithic mortuary house or enclosure, a Bronze Age ceremonial or ritual monument to a medieval animal pound. It has even been suggested that the upright granite slabs look like chairs and has the appearance of a place of council. The bank has dropped over the years and excavation may uncover further fallen stones. In the centre of the south side one of the stones has been set at right angles to the bank, seemingly deliberately marking a significant feature. Unfortunately the opposite position on the north bank has been disturbed. The unexcavated monument frequently becomes waterlogged and has suffered some damage by cattle in the past, consequently now a gated fence surrounds the site and gives some protection.

Gorse fires are not uncommon on heath and moorland in late summer following prolonged dry periods but this is unseasonally early. The blaze across Bodmin Moor is being investigated by police, who suspect it was started deliberately. There was an unusually high number of gorse fires reported over the weekend with seven gorse fires reported in a twelve hour period between midday and midnight on Saturday which are thought to be the work of arsonists.

Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service (CFRS) has reported an unprecedented number of gorse fires in recent weeks; during February and up to mid March, there have been 58 reported incidents all across Cornwall, with 34 believed to have been started deliberately.

CFRS prevention manager Sacha Wheatman said apart from the damage to land and property, dealing with the needless fires resulted in resources being unavailable.
"Arson puts both the public and firefighters at unnecessary risk. It ties up resources that could be in demand for other more serious incidents. While we area dealing with a gorse fire we might be delayed in dealing with a house fire or road traffic collision extrication."

He urged people to be careful in dry conditions: "A carelessly discarded cigarette can lead to a huge fire and with many areas in Cornwall being recognised as Sites of Special Scientific Interest, the results to the wildlife and plant life can be devastating." [1]

On this occasion the fire did not appear to have reached or damaged the early Bronze Age site of King Arthur's Hall. Whether the gorse fires had been started with the deliberate intention of damaging ancient monuments like Leskernick Bronze Age village complex, in the middle of Bodmin Moor seems unlikely but cannot be totally ruled out as just over ten years ago two of Cornwall's best known monuments were deliberately set on fire.

In 1999 arsonists attacked the ancient Men an Tol and Lanyon Quoit stones in Cornwall and threatened to "reduce them to rubble" in protest over unspecified mistreatment of them in the past. The stones have stood on isolated moorland for the past 5,000 years, now in the guardianship of English Heritage and on National Trust land, were badly scorched and coated with a thick sticky mess, which the arsonists claimed was "stolen napalm".

A photograph showing fire blazing around the stones, and a letter claiming credit for the attack, were sent to the Cornishman newspaper, which was passed onto Devon and Cornwall police. The letter claimed three people, calling themselves 'Friends of the Stone', carried out the attack "on the sacred night of November 5", and described it as "an attempt to make them better, or at least more aesthetically pleasing......you do not deserve the heritage these monuments hold and therefore we intend to act further." [2]

The letter went on to claim that Lanyon Quoit is "a fake prophet" and that the Men an Tol was not correctly aligned, seemingly to be a clear accusation of the treatment of these ancient monuments by Victorian antiquarians who re-erected and rearranged the stones in their attempts to restore the monuments. It will be obvious to regular readers of this blog that I hardly condone the acts of the early antiquarians myself [3] but further desecration of the monuments is not the answer.

Steven Hartgroves of the Cornish archaeology unit said (in 1999) of the attacks on Men an Tol and Lanyon Quoit that there had been a recent increase in damage to monuments. "We find people have been digging up the ground in front of the stones, and leaving little offerings, crystals, plastic beads, even 2p coins. It might seem harmless, and it is clearly intended as a sort of reverence, but it will make the stone circles archaeologically worthless when all the ground around them has been disturbed."

Cornish Ancient Sites Protection Network (CASPN) reports attacks on various ancient Cornish sites in recent years including Zennor Quoit, Boscawen-Un, and the Merry Maidens. Today we still hear regular reports of the desecration of our ancient megalithic monuments: two of the stones at Avebury World Heritage site were smeared with paint the eve of the 1999 summer solstice; in 2005 the Rollrights in Oxfordshire were daubed with bright yellow paint and in 2006 the visitor hut there was burnt to the ground in what police say was a deliberate arson attack.

It is difficult enough trying to protect these ancient monuments from the constant threat of future quarrying and the demand for ever more urban development but with many megalithic sites far from roads or buildings, in remote isolated locations, they are impossible to protect from the menace of modern man.

Notes:

1. This Is Cornwall, 20 April 2010, BBC News online, 22 April 2010,
2. Maev Kennedy, Heritage Correspondent Friday November 12, 1999 The Guardian, through the Cornish Ancient Sites Protection Network (CASPN) website.
3. The Fate of the Tolmen, posted 18th April 2010.

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The Fate of the Tolmen

The Tolmen, painted by Richard Tongue in 1835, perched on the pinnacle of two rocks, in the parish of Constantine in Cornwall. The Tolmen was reputedly 33 feet long, 18 feet 6 inches at its widest and 14 feet 6 inches deep and estimated to weigh 750 tons, it was believed that Druids had erected the megalith on its supports, as was common belief at the time. It was beyond living memory how the massive boulder came to be in such a position; “the Ancients had powers of moving vast weights of which we have no idea”.

Situated on a granite merchant’s estate, The Tolmen, was a massive egg-shaped rock, located at the lip of a quarry about 3 miles from Constantine, dominating countryside and coastal views for miles; "It was a striking object seen on a distant hilltop from the eastern side of Mount's Bay, about midway between Falmouth and Helston".

Although known locally for centuries as the Maen Rock or Maen Toll, the 18th Century Cornish Antiquarian Dr. William Borlase (1696 – 1772) called it The Tolmen – ‘tol’ meaning hole and ‘men’ stone, and was was the first to describe it in print and provides an engraving of it in his Antiquities of Cornwall (1769), a publication which, for the first time, recorded many of the stone circles, menhirs and cromlechs of the area. Not to be confused with the Tolvan Stone near Gweek which is a true holed stone, or the healing stone Men an Tol ('the stone with a hole') on the Penwith Moors, whereas The Tolmen derived its name from the large aperture at its point of support which a person could comfortably walk through. Reverend Borlase, Rector of Ludgvan, near Penzance, attributed the honeycombed upper surface of grooves and gullies to the work of the druids though this claim has since been shown to be simply due to weathering.

The Tolmen was under constant threat from the granite merchant W. Hosken of Penryn, who worked a quarry beneath the stone for many years. By 1849 blasting had eroded granite to within a few feet of its plinth leaving The Tolmen resting on a strip a mere 20 feet wide. In October of the same year Richard Edmonds, of the Natural History and Antiquarian Society of Penzance, feared that unless The Tolmen, "perhaps the most remarkable attached rock in Great Britain", was purchased its future was certainly at risk from persistent quarrying activity. He suggested that the Penzance society with those of Truro and Falmouth should purchase the stone …. "It would be a lasting honour to them: but" he warned "should it be suffered to perish, the disgrace to our native country would never be effaced".

Needless to say, the cash was not forthcoming and with the owner claiming that the stone had become dangerous the quarrying continued. Between Thursday March 4, 1869 and the following Monday morning as many as five blasts had been applied to the stone, but it had held fast. The quarry men now determined to bring it down, prepared a fresh borehole for firing on that evening, but by this time a large crowd of indignant local sympathisers had gathered. Consequently, blasting was postponed until the following morning when an even larger crowd had formed.

Meanwhile, another hole was bored and the final charge was fired. Tragically, on the Feast Day of St Constantine, Tuesday 9th March 1869, The Tolmen fell from its lofty perch and crashed onto the quarry ground below, joining the splintered remains of distant relatives on the slaughter bed of the quarry floor. Lost forever. The ‘West Briton’ reported:

"This ancient colossal monument slowly swerved and majestically slid to the bottom of the quarry. A deep feeling of grief and regret, as for the loss of an old friend, pervades the district, a sentiment that, to their credit, appeared to be shared by the workmen employed in carrying on the work of destruction. A great national heirloom, its presence among us was like a still yet mighty voice reaching down from distant ages – a voice now hushed by an act of sacrilege".

The loss of the stone fired the passion of a nation; as a result The Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882 was introduced by Sir John Lubbock, (1834–1913), who recognised the need for government intervention and central administration for the protection of ancient monuments, the intention, thus to avoid a repetition of The Fate of the Tolmen. After a number of failed previous attempts on heritage protection acts, he finally succeeding in getting the Act onto the statute book after nearly a decade of negotiations; Lubbock orchestrated the first ancient monuments legislation in Britain. The gradual change towards a state-based authority responsible for the safeguarding of the Country's national heritage manifested itself through the appointment of the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments in 1883 General Pitt-Rivers, considered by many to be the father of Archaeology.

In 1865 Lubbock, a distinguished amateur biologist, published Prehistoric Times, considered by some to be the most influential archaeological text book of the 19th Century. Lubbock introduced the terms 'Palaeolithic' and 'Neolithic' to denote the Old and New Stone Ages, respectively. The enormously popular book went through several editions, the last in 1913, the author drawing on ethnography to aid interpretation of the archaeological material, included another of Lubbock's interests: the preservation of archaeological remains.

A close friend of Charles Darwin, Lubbock was an early advocate of the theory of evolution in his approach to archaeological material. He entered into extensive correspondence with Charles Darwin, who lived nearby in Downe. When Darwin died in 1882, Lubbock proposed the honour of his burial in Westminster Abbey, sending a letter to the Dean to arrange this, and was one of the pallbearers at the funeral

Unfortunately The Ancient Monuments Protection Act, although full of good intention, has done little to safeguard the National heritage of our ancient monuments. Agriculture and the onward progress of developing nations often takes the blame for the loss of ancient sites but Antiquarians of the past have done immense damage in excavations in the name of 'Archaeology' over the last few hundred years or more, particularly with with the 'great barrow excavations' of the 19th Century; Sir Richard Colt Hoare and his chief excavator, William Cunnington drilled into most of the barrows on Salisbury Plain and removed 'treasures' for storage at Hoare's mansion or megaliths for Cunnington's garden. Even one of the earliest depictions of Stonehenge (William Rogers, 1600), shows a excavation of a barrow on the periphery of the henge monument with extracted human remains.

Pitt-Rivers himself, as we have seen above appointed Inspector of Ancient Monuments, was renown for stripping out entire archaeological sites. This is demonstrated by photographs of his 'systematic excavation' of Wor Barrow, on his own estate in Dorset. If this was the actions of the Inspector of Ancient monuments what hope was there to be for the rest?

Pitt-Rivers complete destruction of Wor Barrow, the whole site being demolished.
The original height of the barrow marked by the central pyramids.

Writing in 1861 in 'A Week at The Land's End' J T Blight records the demise of West Lanyon Quoit and the ill-fate awaiting the gravediggers: “The person who pulled down this cromlech is said to have brought a number of misfortunes about him in consequence; thus his cattle died and crops failed, which left a warning impression on the minds of his neighbours”.

Close by the remnants of West Lanyon Quoit, can be found a surviving dolmen known simply as Lanyon Quoit. In the mid 18th Century, the structure was tall enough for a person on horse back to stand under, the capstone 7 feet high, estimated to weigh 13.5 tons. The landowner had a dream which led him to have the quoit excavated. A six foot deep pit was dug and a grave was found. Lanyon Quoit has suffered further disturbances, which made the quoit unstable under the weight of the massive capstone, with one of the four supports broken in half, subsequently it collapsed after standing for thousands of years. It was reconstructed in 1815. Lanyon Quoit is probably the most visited quoit in Cornwall, and easily the most accessible, being only a few yards from the road leading from Madron to Morvah.

Blight's paper's passed in to the hands of his colleague William Copeland Borlase, a native of Penzance and great, great, grandson of Reverend William Borlase who drew attention to the Fate of the Tolmen as we have seen above. WC Borlase produced his Naenia Cornubiae in 1872 from Blight's and Dr Borlase's notes, a valuable record of Cornish megalithic monuments, but he was another who adopted the same crude excavation methods, digging around and into monuments trying to obtain funerary objects to support his theory that the sites were tombs and nothing to do with the Druids who he despised. However, he seemed to accept that there was something rather mysterious about these ancient monuments. In 1885 WC Borlase noted that miners returning from work at night had sometimes reported seeing strange lights burning on the neolithic Ballowall Barrow, high above the sea cliffs near St Just. Ballowall was lost after being used throughout the Neolithic and Middle Bronze Age. The 67 ft diameter cairn, lie hidden for generations under the spoil from local tin mining activity. It was finally excavated in 1878 revealing that the site was constructed around a chambered round cairn, entered by a 11 ft long covered passage way.

WC Borlase decried poor archaeological methods amongst his colleagues: “...more than one half [of Cornish monuments] have been opened, as a mere matter of curiosity, by persons leaving no record whatever of the result”. However, he seems to have been just as guilty in his own destructive techniques.

In 'The Old Stones of Land's End' (1974) John Michell lays the blame for the destruction of some of these Cornish monuments directly with Borlase, the younger. In describing the Stone at Pridden, a large megalith set in the corner of the hedge, in a valley of the road from St Buryan to Catchall and Penzance, Michell noted the stone has developed a dangerous list since Borlase sketched it in 1871: “probably due to his excavations described on pages 100 – 101 of NAENIA CORNUBIAE. He removed a cairn heaped up against its southern side and discovered a few splinters of human bone. He also found that the stone was planted only 6 inches in the ground”.

Zennor Quoit was once a very fine example of a Cornish portal dolmen and had the largest capstone in the county, measuring 18 feet long, originally covering two chambers and traces of a circular mound, 14 yards in diameter, remain which may have once covered the whole monument. However, little evidence of the barrow remains today. Over the years the quoit has suffered badly at the hands of man. Unfortunately the stones were a convenient size for building material, and was robbed accordingly by a local farmer for use in his cow shed, the cornerstones of which are still close by. Consequently the capstone slipped, while a supporting stone was removed, making the monument unstable. It is only by good luck that Zennor Quoit was not completely removed by the farmer for its stone. The local vicar heard of the destruction in progress and paid the farmer five shillings to refrain, but he could have saved his money as it is said that if any of the stones are removed from the site they would find their own way back by morning. Nevertheless, bad luck fell on the farmer, his crops failed and his cattle died.

Zennor Quoit by William Borlase 1769.

However, it is not just the lesser known sites that the The Ancient Monuments Protection Act has failed to protect; Pitt-Rivers method of completely stripping out sites was employed by Colonel Hawley in his excavations of Stonehenge of the 1920's, prompting Richard Atkinson to say that the site had been dug up like potatoes (Stonehenge, 1965). The site was stripped to the bedrock destroying the potential for future investigations to reveal further information on the site.

And still it goes on......... John Michell noted that of the 34 standing stones described in his book 'The Old Stones of Land's End' (1974) two had been removed from their sites by the time the second edition was published only five years later in 1979.

The threat of further quarrying persists at Thornborough Henges and Stanton Moor stone circles to name but two sites under serious risk, and as we saw in an earlier post, when it comes to mineral extraction and the expansion of advancing civilisations these 'sacred' sites are no longer regarded as sacred; even 'World Heritage Site' status fails to protect ancient monuments.

In conclusion, the fate of our megalithic monuments is aptly put by the late John Michell in the opening paragraph to his book, Megolithmania:

“Up to a few years ago, most of the thousands of megalithic sites throughout Western Europe were little visited other than by professional archaeologists, whose one, primitive method of investigation, with spade and pickaxe, has added considerably to the damage still being done by farmers, builders, foresters, road-makers and anyone else who covets their sites or materials. A vast tonnage of ancient treasures had been dug out from the monuments where they were carefully placed four or more thousand years ago, often to be lost or destroyed or, at best, reburied in the vaults of museums. In the process of yielding up their spoils, a great many prehistoric monuments have been damaged or totally obliterated, leaving a sadly reduced stock of antiquities for scientific study in the present and future. And the most damning criticism of excavations at ancient sites, whether by simple treasure-hunters or highly trained archaeologists, is that the sum total of all their labours has contributed scarcely at all to resolving the problem obviously presented by the substantial presence of megalithic monuments, the problem of why they were built”.

As ever more ancient monuments are lost year after year, that question becomes increasingly more difficult to answer.

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Further reading:
John Michell, The Old Stones of Land's End, Garnstone, 1974.
John Michell, Megolithamania, Thames and Hudson, 1982.
Craig Weatherhill and Paul Devereux, Myths and Legends of Cornwall, Sigma, 1994.

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