Our continuing adventures: Carole had to get back to Dublin, so we put her on the train in Abergavenny and moved on through South Wales to Somerset, and then to Devon and Cornwall. This meant crossing that dire Severn Bridge again. Olwen was driving and we didn’t get arrested.
Wells Cathedral
Along the way, we stopped to see Wells Cathedral. This is one of the most beautiful cathedrals I’ve seen.
We breezed through Glastonbury but didn’t climb the Tor. It was rainy and windy, not as cold as Wales, but still glad I had my parka.
We spent that night in a beautiful old coaching inn in Exeter. Just seeing the layout of this place was really interesting. Before railroads, most people had to rely on coaches for their travel needs.
Exeter Cathedral
This is a very beautiful and ornate cathedral. It has the biggest flying buttresses I’ve seen.
We got talking to two of the stewards. They told us about the “Baedekker bombings” during WWII: Hitler aimed to demoralize the British people by deliberately targeting culturally and historically significant sites. One bomb did hit the cathedral, but they had removed all the precious stained glass and as much of the statuary as they could, and built up other areas with sandbags. So the damage was minimized and they were able to repair it.
We drove to a tiny village on the underside of Cornwall called East Looe. The buildings are terraced up the steep hills on each side of a river flowing out into the sea. This is a common feature of these coastal towns. Our hotel was 400 years old, very well kept up, and our hosts were helpful and very friendly. We spent the next few days exploring around Dartmoor.
We didn’t know it at the time, but if we’d gone for a walk the other direction, we would have passed a property called Menabilly. Turns out — this was the home of the author Daphne Du Maurier! I am a big fan! In her book Rebecca, she modeled Manderlay on this very place.
When she was a girl, she’d come to this area on holiday with her parents. While scouting around, she chanced upon this old crumbling mansion. Naturally, she explored it and never forgot it. Later on, her husband bought it for her. Nice, huh? They carefully restored it to its former glory. I’m sure we’d only have been able to peer through the gates, but still.
Again, this area is absolutely swamped with megalithic monuments and interesting historic sites, you almost don’t know where to begin. And as usual we spent a lot of time looking for places we never found or getting lost.
Brentor
Another point on the St. Michael’s ley line, Brentor juts up out of the flat countryside and is crowned with a little chapel built in 1130 CE. The remains of a hillfort enclose the church, indicating a pre-Christian stronghold. It would have been used for signal fires for millenia.
Spinster’s Rock
This elegant dolmen is all that remains of an extensive megalithic complex, which was all destroyed by the early 19th century. Surviving records describe avenues of standing stones which formed a giant cross. This dolmen fell down and was rebuilt in 1862; they had to cut a ledge into the third support stone.
The name comes from the local legend which says three spinsters erected it one day before breakfast. So often, single women star in these old stories: you’ve got your virginal maidens, your spinsters, widow women, and of course your old hags. It seems there is a super-power in being assumed to be celibate.
Scorhill stone circle
It took us a while to find this one, but in the meantime we drove down some of the prettiest wooded roads I’ve ever seen. What a beautiful landscape, even in late winter!
From my journal: “…these wooded glens, moss-covered, deep rich green, tangled trees, a stream bubbling through tumbled boulders, heavy-limbed trees arching over the road… gentle wooded valleys where the hills tuck into one another… the earth looks like the curves of a woman’s body… Then climb to the moor, high, flat, round, with big patches of red, is it heather? The ubiquitous gorse, parts that look burned, deliberately I think….”
Finally we pulled into a farmer’s driveway and he gave us good directions. Even then it was a 1.5-hour round trip hike to see the circle. And we both got soaked, but it was worth it.
It was getting dark by the time we got back to the car. We drove home across Dartmoor. Even though it is flat, somehow you feel you are high up.
A thick fog descended out of nowhere, and we had to crawl along with very poor visibility. From my journal: “The road was mostly straight but it got hairy at times — we drove back in the dark — which was hairy on the main roads cuz you can’t read the signs through the fog and hairy on the little roads cuz it’s so dark and they are so narrow, you can’t see and the on-coming cars blind you.” Oh, but what fun!
Duloe stone circle
We started out this foggy day on Bodmin Moor and saw this beautiful stone circle of quartz stones.
Trethevy Quoit
The local name is the Giant’s House. This dolmen dates from around 3500 BCE and has five of its original uprights. The capstone would have been less slanted, as one of the uprights at the back has collapsed.
This dolmen is remarkable in that it originally had two chambers inside. The only other one like that in Cornwall is Lanyon Quoit.
Another unusual feature: the capstone has a hole. We don’t know if it was original or added later, or what its purpose was.
The Hurlers
Remember that opening scene in An American Werewolf in London where the locals urge the boys to stay on the path? I was thinking of all those movies and books where people get lost in the fog as Olwen and I traipsed along looking for this stone circle.
This site was originally three aligned stone circles, but only one is intact today. The name comes from a story about some guys playing hurling who were turned to stone.
It would have been very easy to get lost in that fog. We stayed on the path.
Tintagel
Tintagel is an ithsmus on the “upper” coast of Cornwall. If you were looking for a defensible place, you couldn’t do better. Here is a picture from space:
They call it an island, and it very nearly is. The sides are steep and the sea is wild and exposed; the only way to get access is via that thin neck of rock visible there.
No doubt some enterprising warlord built the first bridge to the island long before the Romans came. Pottery and coins found on the island indicate it was in use during the Roman occupation. After they left, the local Cornish tribes built fortifications on the island; the ruins are still visible. Around the 7th century, the site was abandoned. It was refortified in the 13th century and was in use til around 1600, when it was again abandoned.
In the Arthurian legend, Tintagel was the stronghold of Gorlois, whose wife Ygraine was mother to Arthur. Of course we can never know how much truth there may have been. But archeology shows that Tintagel was occupied and fortified around the time in question, approx. 500 CE.
Whether that’s all just a fairy tale or not, the place is incredibly, breathtakingly cool.
NOTA BENE — Tintagel is very different now. I was there again in 2005 and have looked around via Google Earth, enough to know that you should look at these descriptions and pictures as historical artifacts. To see those pix, click here to go to my 2005 page.
You walk down a long steep road to get down to the bridge, then you start climbing a lot of stairs. It’s very steep.
Then looking back where you came from, this is what you see:
Here you can see the 5th c. ruins in the foreground. Beyond are parts of the 13th century ruins, and then you can see back to the mainland where you can see the steps leading down to the bridge.
There is a nice beach down there and a cave they call Merlin’s Cave.
If you want more pics of this enchanting place, click here to go to my 2005 page.
We were staying in St. Ives for a few days. Carole had urged us to see a church there, but it was not open. St. Ives is a gorgeous little town, stone houses perched along narrow streets criss-crossing the steep hillsides around a small harbor. Absolutely gorgeous view. The window from our B&B room looked directly out onto the sea; if you jumped out the window, you’d land in the sea.
The big shocker about St. Ives was that it was full of tourists! Everywhere we had visited so far had been nearly deserted, but here we actually bumped into people. And yet once the sun went down, the streets were empty. The place where we ate dinner, we were the only customers.
St. Michael’s Mount
It’s like a mini-Mont-Saint-Michel. At low tide, you can walk across to the island, but we timed it wrong, so we just enjoyed the view.
Before the melting of the last glaciers, the sea level here would have been much lower. In Mount’s Bay, old tree stumps have been dredged up. Imagine that island surrounded by forest!
And naturally, it’s on the St. Michael ley line.
The area we explored next has several megalithic sites all clustered in the same general area. Some have been damaged or destroyed, but there’s still plenty to see.
The Pipers and the Merry Maidens
The Pipers are two of the tallest standing stones in Cornwall. There’s a legend they were set up to commemorate Athelstan’s conquest of Cornwall in the 10th century, as revelers turned to stone. But more likely they are Neolithic in origin.
Next door to the Pipers are the Merry Maidens. Another local legend says these 19 maidens were turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday. The Pipers are the two musicians who played for them, also turned to stone.
The Blind Fiddler
More punitive petrification: he was turned to stone for playing music on a Sunday.
Boscawen-Un stone circle
This stone circle is unusual in that it has a single standing stone in the middle of the circle. It tilts and it’s a little bit off-center, but it’s impossible to know if that was original or due to some later interference. It’s likely the central stone is Neolithic and predates the stone circle, which is Bronze age. The circle has 19 stones. (Seems like the number 19 has some significance.)
The central stone has 2 faint carvings of an ax shape visible near the base, which we saw in Brittany. It’s the only instance of this in the UK.
Sancreed Holy Well
For millenia, certain wells were said to have healing properties. Christians adopted them for their own purposes, often using them for baptisms, but they’d been holy for many long years before that.
Two little boys led us to this spot. The tree guarding the entrance is draped with strips of fabric, offerings from visitors. I left my hair bob.
The well was buried beneath undergrowth, lost and forgotten until 1879 when a local guy discovered it.
It’s an actual structure where you go down some steps into a little underground cavern.
Such rain! My coat was so wet, I could wring it out.
Carn Euny settlement and fogou
In Cornwall, some Bronze and early Iron Age settlements had a fogou (pronounced foo-goo), which is an underground tunnel or cavern. The entrance would be hidden, opening up inside to be quite roomy. It could have been an escape route, but it’s also likely they were used for food storage like a root cellar or as a place to hide valuables. Or there may have been some kind of ritual use, though no evidence of that has been found.
Two Iron Age villages were erected at Carn Euny on top of Neolithic and Bronze age remains. The first was made of timber in about the 2nd c. BCE. The second was during the Roman period and was begun in the 1st c. BCE. It was in use until around 400 CE. Interesting: the fogou seems to have been filled in when the village was abandoned.
It had been pouring rain: Notice how dry the interior of the fogou is.
Land’s End
It wasn’t all that long ago when the sea was rising steadily as the glaciers retreated. So along the coastlines, generations of people watched as the tides got higher and higher. Familiar points of land got cut off and became islands, and later disappeared completely beneath the sea. Here at the end of the earth in Cornwall, this lost world was called Lyonesse.
On a clear day, you can see the Scilly Islands, 28 miles away. Before the glaciers melted, you could walk there. You can see why there were stories about a drowned world beneath the waves. See Blather for more info.
It’s a very beautiful and atmospheric place, but it was very touristy and very crowded, even in late March.
Pendeen Vau fogou
Another fogou, approximately 3000 years old. This one has 2 auxiliary passages cut into the earth. There were legends claiming that the passage led all the way to the sea but there is no evidence for that.
Men An Tol
A long, wet hike up a muddy hillside, but worth it. The stones have been rearranged to make them line up, which is a shame. The legend is you should pass your baby through the hole for good health and luck. Another says this will ease back pain. I climbed through, you know, just in case.
Other stones and cairns can be found nearby indicating this may have once been part of a stone circle. It’s late Neolithic or early Bronze age. It’s thought that the hole in the stone occurred naturally rather than being cut out.
Lanyon Quoit
This one fell down in the early 19th century and was changed when it was re-erected. It used to be tall enough you could ride a horse under the capstone.
It lies at the end of a ruined long barrow, which is badly damaged. We did not see it.
New Globe Theater
We were sad to leave Cornwall and return to London, but we had a few days of great fun there before flying home. A couple highlights: We saw La Traviata at Covent Garden (both of us are huge opera fans) and we visited the New Globe Theater.
The New Globe Theater is an attempt to replicate Shakespeare’s original theater using materials and methods from the Elizabethan era (as far as safety regs would allow). It sits less than 800 feet from where Shakespeare’s Globe sat. When we saw it, it was almost ready for use.
The 15th century theater experience is not designed for comfort. The theater is round, and there is no roof over the middle section. So if you get the cheap tickets, you have to stand on the floor (no seats) through the whole performance and get rained on. In the better seats under the roof, you could get out of the rain, but you had to sit on wooden benches with no backs. They advise people to bring a pillow to sit on.
And so ended the 1996 trip. Looking back now, I am astonished at how much we saw and did in a few short weeks. Yet I felt then (and now) we were just skimming the surface. It has always been my intention to go back and choose one of these areas, just one, and spend several whole weeks in one spot.
Click here to carry on with 1997.