The Stone Circles of CornwallAuthor(s): B. C. SpoonerSource: Folklore, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Dec., 1953), pp. 484-487Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1257874 .

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COLLECTANEA

THE STONE CIRCLES OF CORNWALL

DONs MEYN, the Dance of Stones. That was one of the names given by the Cornish-speaking people to their ancient stone circles; though like the Cornish word dynas or hill-fort, it has been misinterpreted as a reference to the marauding " Danes " of local tradition. The " popular " form since 1769 has been Dawns Men. Today it is the Rosemodres circle that bears the name; though the Tregaseal and Boscawen-Un circles in St. Just and Buryan, and probably others also, have borne it.

The circles are " so called of the common people on no other account, than that they are placed in a circular Order, and so make an area for Dancing " wrote Lhuyd, theorizing, and upheld by Dr. Borlase who even suggested the dance-an old one, called Trematheeves.1 But dancing, though there can be no proof of a coeval, ritual ancestry for it, must be of long popular association with these circles; for Boscawen-Un figures with Stonehenge itself in a Triad of the (at latest) sixteenth century on the three chief Gorsedds of the Island of Britain, and Stonehenge was the Chorea gigantum or " Giants' Dance " of I 135, of Geoffrey of Monmouth's time, and the Karole as Gaians, the Giants' Carol or Round Dance of Wace, in II55.

Other circles are called " Maidens " and " Hurlers ". The " Maidens " were girls punished for dancing on the Sabbath, and the " Hurlers " were men who broke the Sabbath by playing the Cornish ball-game called " hurling ". That the stones of a circle once moved as living and breathing dancers or hurlers or what not and became stone for their sin and that was an end to it, is Christianity speaking; but that being stones with a stony " life ", they can yet return if removed from their sites-that is the voice of the older animism; and ill-luck comes to the shifter. Both versions now have their aetiological uses; and both " dance " and " return " connect movement with the stones.

The Rosemodres " Merry Maidens " (otherwise the Dons Meyn) danced to the music of the two outlying stones still called The Pipers. Other " Maidens " were the stones of the circles of Tregaseal, Wendron, Boscawen-Un, Boskednan, and the vanished ones of Botallack. The stones of the St. Columb alignment were " Sisters " in 1584 and " call'd commonly the Nine Maids " in 1754. Yet Bottrell complains-and of the Rosemodres circle, still with its joint name-and-folktale association with dancing-that the " Maidens " idea is an importation by " visitors " who had " seen it in books ". The old people he said, " never regard the name as having any connection with dancing maids any more than with dairy maids, and the Menhere, changed into Pipers, were known to them by the name of the Hurlers, from their having been a goal for the hurling- run, when the starting-post (where the ball was thrown up) was the cross

1 For a note on this dance, see Folklore recorded in the Cornish Language, p. 18 by R. Morton Nance. Privately printed.

484

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Collectanea 485 in the Church-town." He also blames it on a corruption of meyn into " Maidens " ; but by way of an intermediate medn that is a philological impossibility.2 The idea that such stones were mortals petrified in some action is, however, too universal to be dependent upon borrowing or upon a corruption or misunderstanding of a Cornish word.

There remain the " Hurlers "-hurlysy, in Cornish. Bottrell's state- ment that the Rosemodres stones were used as a hurling goal, is either a plain record of such a contemporary use of the stones or the unconscious preservation of a local story : perhaps both. There may have been such a use both at Rosemodres and elsewhere. But in the sixteenth century and perhaps earlier, the idea of stones themselves as petrified players was already accepted of the three contiguous circles in Linkinhorne-St. Cleer, called The Hurlers. The tale even travelled to Amsterdam where it was printed in a Latin treatise on Cornwall in 1661. George Borrow heard of a golden ball, and of the gaunt round-headed cross called Long Tom as the hurler of it; and a generation back a round stone was kept in a neighbouring mine count-house, half in joke.

It is these " Hurlers " that provide Cornwall with her example of the difficulty-in-counting story-" as at Stonehenge ", Carew wrote in 1602 : in 1675 they were reported " now easily numbered but the people have a story that they never could till a man took many penny Loafes and laying one on each hurler did compute by the remd. what number they were ". It is the only Cornish suggestion of the practice of laying a food-offering on such stones; and is shared by other places, notably by the Rollright circle.

Yet another name for the circles, and the most inexplicable, was " Nine Stones ", the true rendering of the Cornish Naw men. There is a Goyn Nawmen3 (or Down of the Nine Stones) mentioned in a charter of 1342 : though these Nine Stones were only the peristalith of a barrow and not a free-standing circle. In southern Cornwall men has presumably de- generated into " Maidens ", but the name is used in its correct English translation of Naw men as " Nine Stones " in north Cornwall (that is, where it is used at all) as early as 14oo." Of the six Cornish circles still known to have been called Nine Maidens or Stones, only one consists of a doubtful nine, and that is the restored circle of Altarnun. Three of the remaining five circles in question have nineteen or twenty stones.

This and the disparity between the name " Nine " and the number has led to the suggestion that " Nine " is a corruption of " Nineteen " and

2 According to Mr. Nance, the authority on Cornish (private correspondence.) 3 C. G. Henderson, Old Cornwall (the magazine of the Federation of Old Corn-

wall Societies) No. 9, p. 26. Also R. M. Nance, Old Cornwall, vol. iv, No. 3. p.107. 4 C. G. Henderson, Cornish Times, Oct. 19, 1928. "

Nonnestonys ", near Five Lanes. But Goodaver Circle near Dosmary Pool has evidently lost its name, " Nine Stones ", to the neighbouring farm. There is a " Noman's Land " near the St. Columb alignment; though this a common name for waste lands. Of these circles recorded as Nine Maidens or Nine Stones, Rosmodres had 19 or 20; Wendron, unknown and I5 ; Boscawen-Un, 20 if the central stone is counted; Tregaseal unknown and a doubtful 20; Boskednan, 20; St. Columb alignment, 9; Goodaver, uncertain, but many over 29; Botallack circles had many more; Altarnun, an uncertain 9 (" restored ").

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486 Collectanea has an astronomical import, signifying the nineteen years of the Metonic cycle. But this would be to antedate Meton's discovery of the cycle by centuries. And with nineteen as with nine, the disparity between name and number remains: the Wendron " Nine Stones " had neither nine- teen nor nine stones; Goodaver, many more than nineteen.

Nine as the actual number of stones in a circle is not unknown, there is a " Stone Dance " in Mecklenburg consisting of three, with nine stones in each circle. And the name-and the number-of the stones agree in Las Naou Peyros, at Pau, south of the Garonne, and in the Nine Stones of Winterbourne Abbas in Dorset. But in Cornwall-and, I believe, some- times in Scotland-we have the absence of the number and the prevalence of the name; therefore the significance is not necessarily (in Cornwall) in the number of the stones. " You know everybody hereabouts uses nine in all their charms and many other matters ",5 wrote Bottrell : and in that universal people's magic mentioned by Bottrell, it is not the word " nine " that counts, but actually one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Yet they "also call old stone circles 'Nine-Maidens', though they are ", he adds, " for the most part, formed of many more than nine stones ". There seems to be no explanation of the " Nine " except what perhaps " time " may afford.

The stone circles have had their parts to play with time-if only that their moving shadows take note of its passing. And " time " in the shape of an hour has its traditional effect on them : the hour of the stones, according to tradition, is twelve, midday, noon; the hour of the sun and the sun's meridian, of the full strength of the noonday devil, the still hour of Pan. All seventeen of the " Nine Stones " on Beltone Tor-which like Cornwall is within the ancient Dumnonia-dance at midday; and so do the stone circles in Brittany-at midnight. And though no Twelve o'clock tales of the Cornish circles remain, there is the movement of " dance " and " return " ; and the isolated stone re-acts to the hour in Cornwall as elsewhere. The sun strikes the flank of the Trink Hill " Twelve o'clock " stone, for example, using it as a dial; hence its name. When the stone " hears " cock-crow it turns itself ; and would turn just as well as do others, in response to church bells or a striking clock, if it were within " hearing " of them.6 It is this stony " hearing " that has

6 Traditions and Hearthside Stories of W. Cornwall, I88o. 9 times round the Sennen Stone; Nine times through the holed Tolven at Gweek, and the Morva Crick Stone. Nine (though not exclusively nine) clings to the stones. 9 pebbles placed near a menhir in Brittany would transfer disease from the placer to the finder (R. M. Nance, Old Cornwall No. 4, p. 32). 9 smooth white pebbles were placed on Mayday by a well of St. Brigid in Scotland. (Folk-Lore. Calendar Customs: Scotland, vol. 3, 1941).

6 The cock-crow Stone at Looe turned three times whenever a cock crowed ; it now lies in the harbour (Hunt, Popular Romances of the W. of England). The topmost stone of the Cheesewring turns three times when it hears cock-crow (Ibid.). The headless cross in Lewannick goes down to the Inney to drink, when it hears the church bells (Oral). The cross called Mid-Moor Post turned so often to the sound of St. Breward church bells that it fell down (Langdon, Old Cornish Crosses). There are French stones that turn at cock-crow or when they hear midnight or midday rung.

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Collectanea 487 become a joke. "When they stone balls see Squire Tremayne, They jump on the ground and then back again."' In other words, Everything moves at Twelve. Even elm-trees and the ridge-tile horsemen on Pad- stow, St. Ives, Marazion and Polperro roofs and the stone eagles of a house in Launceston, race round a field, gallop, turn, go down to the river to drink at the stroke of twelve. The enquiring child, watching to see the riders gallop, the eagles go down to the river to drink and be whacked by the stone Britannia if they return late, is always told he has " just missed " it by turning his head aside, or the like. But the idea behind the joke, and the dancing of the Belstone circle and, possibly, the Stone " Dances ", and behind those grim Breton tales of the stones of circles that reel and lurch back from their midnight drinking right on to the thief of their bared treasure, is the same-at a certain hour something happens, life, movement, comes to the stones. And that hour is Twelve. Or Noon. Or Dryden's " Noon of night ".

But there is no word in Cornish that both means and sounds like Noon : there is only " midday ", hanterdeth. And the name of the circles is distinctly naw men, Nine Stones.

Yet Noon and Nine can be reconciled. Noon is derived from the Latin none hora, the ninth hour after sunrise, when the Office of Nones was to be recited. By the fourteenth century the fusion of the Offices of the Canonical Hours had brought the time for the recital of Nones from three p.m. to midday; which in its turn came to be called None in mediaeval France, and in England, Noon. If therefore the stones of the Cornish circles also once bowed at midday it was now to the bell of Nones that they responded, it was the name of None that they took, why and what- ever they were first named. Their ancient time-telling became lost in the babel of confusion between clocca, cloq, clogh-bell and clock : Cock-crow, and the sun on their flanks, alone remained to them of their old preoccupa- tion with the sun's journeyings.

There are things that favour this theoretical Nones-noon interpretation of Naw men, notably the accepted sun association of the circles, the almost universal twelve o'clock folklore and the lack of any other known Cornish link with " nine ". But, with that interpretation, for obvious reasons, naw men could date no earlier than the thirteenth century; or was only a mediaeval phase in the veiled history of some Nine whose significance is not known .... This limitation of age, however, is not for the sun association, or the midday folklore.

B. C. SPOONER

7 For this, and many other examples, see E. Thurstan, Trees and Shrubs in Cornwall, 1930.

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