Near Four Lanes stands what remains of two stone circles. Next to the B3280 the six remaining menhirs survive. Four still standing in situ and two others that have been built into the adjacent stone hedge.
Thought to be early bronze age the two circles once stood 18 metres apart with now only the south-east circle partially remaining. It originally contained 14 or 15 stones and was 16 meters across. The north-west circle has two stones remaining, but they too have been built into the hedge. The stones themselves are small in comparison to some circles in Cornwall, standing between just 0.8 and 1.2 metres tall.
One of the menhirs that have been built into the stone hedgerow
The original Cornish name is Nine Sisters or Naw Whor. Rober Hunt (1865) suggests the monument was named in memory of nine sisters or nuns. A departure from the usual story attributed to British megaliths of maidens turned to stone for disrespecting the Sabbath – as the circle’s English name suggests.
Sited near the crest of a hill with views of Carnmenellis, and Nine Maidens downs to Crowan Beacon half a mile to the west, north to Carn Brea and even across to the coast at Poldhu on a clear day. The stone circle has a prominent place in a landscape of prehistoric significance. Half a mile west sits Hangman’s Barrow a bronze age cairn, as well as a large standing stone and Burras Menhir roughly two miles to the south. Calvadnack settlement is a quarter a mile to the south, with the remains of round houses hidden in the heather and bracken. The site is thought to be iron age, although there have been bronze age finds close by.
The view west toward Carnmenellis hill
Bronze age barrows and cairns are found across this landscape, including the barrow found next to the circle and the cairns on Carnmenellis. Does this suggest a link between the stone circles and the places of the dead. Or where the circles meeting places for neighbouring tribes, bringing people together from the north and south of the area, linking coastal people with the inland tribes.
Double, and even triple stone circles are found in Penwith and Bodmin Moor. In 2008 West Cornwall Dowsers believe they found a third site, a possible third circle or an alternative site for the now absent second circle. This circle has a possible alignment to a cairn on the summit of Carnmenellis hill at the equinox sunrise, and possibly Crowan Beacon at midwinter sunset.
The Merry Maidens in Penwith used to be a double stone circle
We’ll probably never know the true meaning of the stone circles but it is clear they are sites significant to prehistoric peoples across thousands of years.
The May-Thorn blossom blooms heralding the changing of the seasons with it’s snowy clouds of petals. The unmistakable perfume of the hawthorn’s delicate white flowers brings the promise of summer on the fresh spring breeze.
This thorny shrub is often found in hedgerows or as small trees standing as lone sentinels in fields and rugged heathland where only the hardiest of flora survive. In Cornwall the impish hawthorn tree is often seen gnarled and twisted, perpetually wind-blown in the fierce Atlantic gales. Looming over the rural lanes from atop the Cornish hedgerows, or stood fast against the elements amongst gorse and heather.
As a seasonal signpost, the hawthorn announces spring with its blossom and greets autumn with its rusty red haws. Blossoming around May Day as the land quickens with life, the Hawthorn is celebrated in the folk customs of the British Isles for marking the birth of summer and the death of winter. For modern pagans the blooming of the hawthorn marks the arrival of Beltane, the Gaelic May Day festival.
May Day Celebrations in Cornwall Today
May-Day is still celebrated today in Cornwall. Obby oss in Padstow, Bolster in St. Agnes, Flora day in Helston, and in Penzance the revived custom of May-Horns. In the past the May-Day was a popular Cornish feast day, or ‘furry day’. Hawthorn blossom was a part of many May-Day folk customs, using the flowers as decoration.
Hawthorn has many names; May Tree, May Blossom, Quick Thorn and Whitethorn. In his book Fern Seed & Fairy Rings, Rupert White tells us how in Cornwall the hawthorn was often called May, Fryth or Aglet Tree. With the young edible shoots often called ‘bread and cheese.’
A tree traditionally sacred in the British Isles, the hawthorn is entrenched in folklore and rich with magical associations. In Celtic mythology the tree is associated with faeries, known to some as faerie-thorn, it marks a liminal space, a gateway to other worlds. It is also known to mark boundaries of sacred lands.
The hawthorn also has dark connotations. Often found standing alone, farmers avoided cutting them down for fear of angering the faeries. Throughout the British Isles it was also considered a dreadful omen of misfortune to bring any cuttings inside the house.
Rupert White tells us, in Cornish folklore it was said that to sit under a hawthorn in May is dangerous, in case you give the faeries power over you. There was also a superstition that young children sitting under the tree may be taken away by the fae.
Hawthorn has medicinal value and is renowned for improving heart health. The leaves, flowers and red berries (or haws), lower blood pressure and are high in vitamin C.
Pawton Quoit is a magnificent portal dolmen built by Cornwall’s stone age inhabitants. The imposing megalith sits, mostly intact, atop a ridge overlooking a steep valley.
Also known as Giant’s Quoit, the monument is found along the back lanes of Wadebridge, up a private farm track. The enormous capstone, which juts out incongruously against the landscape, must weigh at least 15 tonne, and perches on just three points of the supporting upright stones. Part of it has sheared off, and sits where it fell in front of the quoit’s façade. The dolmen sits on a raised earthen mound, perhaps the vestiges of a cairn that covered some or all of the monument.
In Cornwall we call dolmen quoits. A reference to the folk belief that Cornwall’s many megaliths were created by giants throwing stones at each other – quoit being a reference to the dolmen capstones resembling the discs thrown in a traditional game of quoits.
Cornwall’s quoits are thought to have been built in the early to mid-neolithic period. We can only wonder at the engineering skill, and size of the labour force required, to accomplish such a feat in the stone age. The society that built the quoit would have been organised, and have enough abundance to spare those workers from the business of farming food. Moving the huge capstone up the hill, and placing it on top of the uprights, would have been an extraordinary feat. The enormous size of it would have been impractical, and much larger than required to cap the chamber – it’s a statement.
The accomplishment of an immense engineering project like Pawton Quoit must have inferred status upon the community responsible. Portal dolmens would have been visually impressive, dominant markers in the landscape, looking over neolithic settlements and fields. Cornwall would have been mostly covered in dense temperate rain forest, except for small areas cleared for farming and settlement. Hilltops, like this one, would have been beacons rising out of the humid, wild tangle of forest, serving as places of safety and gathering.
Part of the capstone has sheared off and sits in front of the dolmen’s facade
In Cornwall quoits are often found overlooking valleys with a water source, or in places where neolithic settlements and fields have been found. These first farmers transformed the landscape for agriculture and permanent settlements. They were also the first megalithic builders, modifying their environment with monuments like Pawton.
Looking inside the quoit
The day of my visit the weather is wild, we are lashed by a squall of wind and rain blowing in off the North coast. In the early Neolithic period, the climate would have been warmer and drier than it is today. The hilltops, ridges and tor summits would have been more hospitable to settlement before the climate changed in the early bronze-age.
The original purpose of portal dolmen is unknown. It’s possible they were territorial, or used for burial and funerary rites. Although little human remains have been found, suggesting their primary purpose was something else. Given how architecturally impressive quoits like Pawton are, it seems they were meant to be seen. Were these marvels of prehistoric engineering built to meet the needs of the living, rather than those of the dead.
Lichen on the capstoneThe stones host an assortment of lichen
They could be cathedrals of spiritual significance, marking places considered sacred. Possibly for capturing earth energies, or marking the seasons through solar and astral alignments. Maybe the quoits were built to bring people together in ways we can’t imagine in our modern world that’s so disconnected from nature. Maybe these monuments were built for worshipping gods that have long been forgotten.
Or maybe, just maybe, the Cornish giants were real.
From Popular Romances of the West of England . Robert Hunt, 1865
The Nine Maidens stone row stands in a field immediately south of the A39. The early bronze-age monument sits in a field on Breock Downs between St Columb Major and Wadebridge. Nine irregular arrow shaped menhirs stand in a row running SW to NE, parallel to a small stream whose banks are littered with what appear to be large field clearance stones.
Standing from 0.8 metres to 1.9 metres tall, with one recumbent stone 3 metres in length, the menhirs are local grey slate rich with thick quartz veins weaving elaborate paths across them. They are living breathing stones hosting their own eco system of mosses and rare lichens.
To access the stone row, you pass a sleeping hawthorn tree looming over a pool of water. The lone hawthorn is known in Celtic mythology as a fairy tree, a gateway between worlds, a marker of ancient boundaries and sacred ground. It would seem to those early bronze-age people that this ground was indeed sacred. To the North-East of the row there is a solitary menhir, now fallen and broken up, known as The Fiddler, or Magi Stone, which stood on the same alignment as the maidens. The monolith and the stone row are possible ceremonial parts of a bronze-age complex of sites, leading to the burial barrows on the highest point of the ridge.
Views from the barrows on the hilltop north of the Nine Maidens
Standing on top of the largest barrow, to the south I can see the iron-age hill-castles of Castle an Dinas and Demelza Castle, to the east the highest points on Bodmin Moor, Rough Tor and Bronn Wennili (Brown Willy) are visible. Looking to the north I can see Padstow Bay, and north-west along the coast to Trevose Head, the site of an iron-age cliff-castle and a headland that has given up numerous bronze-age finds. Territorially this hillside would have been an important location.
The fields and hedgerows surrounding the monument are littered with large stones, similar to those used in the stone row. Most of these are a result of field clearances, but some look suspiciously similar in shape and size to the stone row menhirs, with thick quartz veins. I can’t help but wonder if there were more stones to this row, or if it’s possible there were other stone monuments in the complex.
Richard Carew in his Survey of Cornwall (1602), names the site TheSisters, and John Norden, in 1728, mentioned another adjoining site he called the Nine Sisters, which may have been a double stone row or circle. In 1995 a team of dowsers believe they found 4 more stones to the row and a second stone row 25ft to the west of it. (Cheryl Straffon, 2004.)
Breock Downs itself is home to other significant prehistoric monuments, including the neolithic dolmen Pawton Quoit, and Men Gurta the largest monolith in Cornwall. It seems reasonable to assume that this was a culturally significant area of ancient Cornwall, a landscape rich with meaning. Were the Nine Maidens a processional monument leading to the peak of the hill where the prominent burial barrows sit. Was this spot a node in a network of hills, ridges and beacons across the spine of mid-Cornwall.
The Nine Maidens will no doubt continue to keep their secrets close, and give us only questions, but it’s the mystery of these Cornish megaliths that has captured imaginations for millennia after millennia.
A peculiar custom, once forgotten, Dolly dunking is a Cornish tradition where young girls would take their dolls to blessed in holy wells on Good Friday. A custom which has documented since the 1800’s.
In Cornish Feasts and Folklore (1890) M.A. Courtney recorded, “On the afternoons of Good Friday, little girls of Carharrack, in the parish of Gwennap, take their dolls to a stream at the foot of Carn Marth and christen them.” However, local anecdotes say this took place at Figgy Dowdy’s Well, also known as Margery Daw’s Well, located near the top of Carn Marth hill.
The same custom was observed at Fenton Bebibell sacred spring in west Penwith. (Cornish Homes and Customs, 1934) Named fenten byghan bobel in Cornish, which translates as “Well of the Little People,” this is a possible reference to the small people of Cornish folklore.
Cornish holy wells, and sacred springs, are thought to be places where spirits dwell, to whom offerings would be made for healing, blessings or foretelling. The custom of ‘dolly dunking’ could hark back to folk memories of ancestral spirits who dwelt in, or nearby, springs and the offerings people made to them.
Alternatively, the ‘little people’ could be a reference to the blessing and naming of babies, a practice that may have once taken place at holy wells. It’s possible these traditional rituals were being remembered and acted out by young girls with their dolls.
Good Friday doll blessing is a tradition that has been revived by CASPN at Fenton Bebibell in Morvah, which sits near the Men an Tol monument. The Cornish Ancient Sites Protection Network resurrected the custom 18 years ago and now do an annual ‘dolly dunk’ on Good Friday. The well was lost to the bracken and gorse of the heathland for decades until it was accidentally rediscovered in the 2000’s.
Is it possible that the tradition of dolly dunking, whatever its origins, was once widespread across Cornwall’s holy wells and springs. Taking place in isolated, insular communites, that weren’t in the habit of writing things down, the local customs were lost to time. Leaving us with only scant records of this peculiar Cornish tradition.
William Wendron balanced on a wooden stool, wedged into the corner of the old pub, leaning upon the slate bar top. A crooked half smile fixed upon his face; old hands deformed with arthritis by years of toil in the damp with pick and axe. He grappled with his mug, draining the last of the sour gin down his throat.
He welcomed the warmth spreading out from his gut, encompassing his wizened body; worn before its time, the pain of years of hard labour dulled under the gin’s spell. He knew he should not have another; he had promised the mine captain he would stop turning up in the morning stinking of gin with glazed eyes. Despite the ember of guilt in his conscience he shouted for the barmaid.
“You’ll be rocking turning up for work tomorrow,” she said as she poured.
He knew his fellow miners were angered by his complacency. He knew he made life more precarious than it already was.
“How else is a broken miner supposed to keep going,” he thought.
His bones ground upon each other and his inflamed joints howled. His lungs were shot these days. Being down in the dark since a boy of eight and now in his thirtieth year; it was taking a vicious toll on his chest. The blasting. The drilling. The dust. All ruinous to the airways.
He sunk half the contents of the mug; the gin catching in his throat, sparking a deep wracking cough that tore through him like knives slicing through his chest wall. Little red specks caught on the glass. His bloodshot eyes peaked wide; fear crumpled his deeply lined face. He slammed his free hand down upon the cracked slate bar, growled, and threw the remaining drink down his throat.
It was a murky muggy morning. The mizzle rain hung as if suspended in the air instead of falling from the sky. Walking to work William wore a slight tell tale tremble.
After collecting his leather hat, brass lamp and pick, he lined up for the man engine. The mighty steam powered beam engine; with its oscillating piston operated the mechanism of synchronised ladders and platforms to transport men up and down the vast hole.
Starting his journey, 400 fathoms down into the mineshaft, William stepped out onto the first narrow wooden ledge to take him down to the next reciprocating platform. He sprung to the next as it rose up toward him.
However, this day the hubris of the well-rehearsed and the fog of the alcohol made him careless. Misjudging his step in one hideous, nauseating moment he was falling to meet his fate. The promise of death rose to meet him.
He plunged, winded, into the depths of glacial black water. Unharmed but with no way of knowing his location in the great underground web of passages; he was certain that death was still to be his fate.
The terrible darkness pressed upon him. He kicked and pulled his way through the water; until he felt a ledge up and out. Relieved but still desperately lost; he convulsed with cold and terror. No way to navigate centuries of old shafts that ran for miles under the earth; he was certain he was still a dead man.
He had no idea how long he lay there when he heard 3 loud knocks. Like splitting rock echoing around him. Three more knocks followed. The sound roused him from his despair.
He spotted three lights dancing in the black. He struggled to focus his eyes upon them, but he was reminded of miner’s lanterns.
“No this cannot be.”
He hauled himself to his feet. With nothing to lose he followed the lights through a crevice in the rock. He squeezed himself through the tunnel; stooping low so not to scalp himself. Water bled from the walls. The consummate dark lit only by the phantom lights ahead.
After what could have been hours the lights blinked out. A whimper of despair escaped his lips. Then he caught the faint taste of the open air. He pressed forward; clawing his way along the old shaft until he saw the sliver of daylight.
He breached the ground and emerged into the world. His face screwed against the hostile sunlight he was bewildered with no sense of place or direction. Overcome with relief he stripped his wet garb from his body and lay prostrate upon a granite slab.
Two voices travelled up the valley, “Hell, I can’t rid myself of that sight of William falling like that.”
The older of the two replied, “A terrible death, but better him than us. At least he took none with him. Foolish drunkard of a man, we are better off without him.”
The two mine workers rounded the corner of the spoil tip and met the sight of a naked William face down in the dirt.
“What is this poor devil doing, with his bare cheeks to the heavens?” said the younger miner.
Rolling onto his back William hooted.
“You! William! For a man of no faith, you are a lucky bastard,” said the oldest.
“How… Why would God save you, of all the damned souls, why you?” He spat into the dirt. “Why you…” His voice caught on the words.
“It wasn’t God that saved me, we all know too well God’s angels don’t dwell under the ground with us men of the dark,” William said.
“Then how?”
“The knockers my friend. Ghosts, miner’s souls trapped forever in the mines. They must have taken pity on me. They led me to the light,” said William.
“You are no friend of ours. We lost so many, but you – you were saved. No – I don’t believe it.”
William sprawled out on his back, wearing nothing but a grin upon his face.
Cornwall, a land rich in myth and legend, with it’s ancient living landscapes and mysterious monuments, it has long been associated with the strange and the unknown.
As an isolated peninsula, Cornwall has retained its ancient folklore and traditions. The Cornish people have kept strong connections with their Celtic past and the old ways passed down through legend and custom.
With its many ritual landscapes, and numinous megaliths, thousands of years of Cornish history can be found amongst its wild liminal spaces.
In Cornwall you’ll find standing stones, holy wells, iron-age fogous, spectacularly sited cliff-castles, bronze-age stone circles, neolithic quoits and tor enclosures.
Cornish folklore is rich with giants, fairies, little people, mermaids and other otherworldly inhabitants. Whilst Cornish feast days and seasonal customs align with ancient Celtic traditions.
