Sunday, 28 July 2013

Moor on looking for the Beast of Bodmin...

Sorry for the break everyone - hopefully all back on track now.

The last post was on the Bodmin Heritage day and this one follows straight after. Bodmin is really too far for a day trip for us so we stayed over which meant that we had most of Sunday down there as well.

I guess no one will be very surprised that we chose to spend it on the moor in search of some of the stone circles!

The obvious starting point was at the Hurlers.  Car park right on the main road and only a short walk to the three circles.

Another glorious sunny day as you can see.

And very quiet


Well there were a few of the locals around dreaming in the sun.


The name comes from a legend in which men playing Cornish Hurling on a Sunday were turned to stone as punishment.




And here are the papers who suffered the same fate for playing music on a Sunday....

As is a quite common legend, it is allegedly  impossible to count the stones accurately.



According to English Heritage these are Bronze age/Neolithic circles and the finest grouping in the South West of England.


As I mentioned they really are very close to the car park so we decided to venture deeper onto the moor in search of the Craddock Moor circle. This was to prove rather more challenging requiring much map and compass work but nothing ventured...

Nowhere near as impressive but much more satisfying to find. We were sitting on a convenient rock when another walker joined us - he looked almost as surprised to see us as we were to see him. As is the usual etiquette of the walker we exchanged a few words of greeting and it rapidly became clear that we had found a local expert on the moor. Peter was able to tell us about lots of the local history and the natural features and we subsequently went and bought his book.


On Peter's recommendation we wandered over to the old hut circles before heading back to the car and lunch in the village pub.

Still had a few hours to kill so we decided to go and have a look at Trethevy Quoit a few miles away.

This turned out to be a nice   Neolithic 'dolmen' burial chamber. It stands about 9ft  high with 5 standing stones and a huge heavy capstone.
What intrigued me though was this mysterious hole in the capstone. A giant's pendant perhaps??

Who knows but I would love to solve this mystery.

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