The weather improved, but it was only predicted to hold for the morning so we set off early. The first destination was to be Men-an-Tol, down the road a couple miles and a half mile walk up the hill.
The name means ‘holed stone’ since, of a set of stones in a field, one has a perfectly circular hole about 18 inches across. The group may date from about 2000 BC, but has been much modified in modern times.
The stone was once known as the Crick Stone, since crawling through it had various healing properties as well as giving you muddy knees. We tried to walk further to see more standing stones and stone circles, but were defeated by the high stone walls and a pool covering the path.
Down the road a bit further is the Lanyon Quoit. This is a 9 by 17 foot flat rock resting atop three man sized rock pillars. It is like the dolmens in Ireland and Brittany, which are thought to be neolithic burial tombs – 3 or 4 thousand years old. There are said to be other smaller burial cists nearby. The quoit was at one time resting on four rocks high enough to allow a horse and rider to pass underneath. It fell in 1815, breaking one of the support rocks. The fall was blamed on lightning, but more likely due to amateurs digging. It was re-erected by public subscription.
Across the hillside could be seen a large stone building that is the remains of the Ding Dong mine, a tin mining operation from the 1800s. The map indicates that area is covered with ‘disused mineshafts’, so it is not an area to go crawling through the bracken.
The small rainstorms that had been going around us all morning now caught us so we drove to the Carn Galver mine near Rosmergy, where you can get a close up look at a similar tin mining ruin. We were going to walk down to the National Trust cliffside trail, but the rain arrived in earnest, so instead we retired to the up-market pub at Treen for lunch. After lunch the rain had settled in for the day so we returned home.
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