The Penwith Moors, north of Penzance in the far west of Cornwall, form one of the richest archaeological landscapes in the country. Just search “historical landmark” on Google Maps and zoom in on the area if you want to see what I mean. The huge Lanyon Quoit; the holed stone at Mên-an-Tol; the Boskednan stone circle; the Iron Age hillfort at Chûn; and much more besides: thousands of years of prehistory crammed into an area just a few miles across.
Among these fabled monuments, you’ll spot a lesser-known landmark, named by Google as “Morvah Standing Stones”. Rising from the scrub at a lonely junction like a granite mushroom, it seems to be a diminutive example of the Neolithic dolmens known as “quoits” in Cornwall. One enthusiastic Google reviewer describes it as an “ancient landmark used by forgotten people of the past” and a “mystical stone signpost”. Who knows, wonders the reviewer, “why these stones were placed here”?
When I spotted this bit of digital mapping recently it provided me with an almighty belly-laugh. I grew up just down the hill from the “Morvah Standing Stones”, and I can tell you exactly which forgotten person of the past built this particular mystical signpost. It wasn’t a druid; it was Terry Davey, a local farmer with a wicked sense of humour, who shunted the thing into place with his tractor in 1999.
There’d been much hysteria around the total eclipse of the sun that summer, and local farmers had placed large granite boulders in their gateways to ward off the rumoured hordes of rogue campers. The eclipse turned out to be a damp squib, and most of the boulders were quickly rolled back into the hedges. But Terry decided to do something more creative.
Before long, passing tourists started taking pictures of what we called Terry’s Quoit. Most were probably looking for the genuinely Neolithic Lanyon Quoit, a mile further along the same road, and must have been somewhat underwhelmed: Lanyon’s capstone weighs 13 tonnes; Terry’s Quoit isn’t much bigger than a coffee table. My grandmother, passing on her daily walk, always took great satisfaction in putting misguided sightseers right, while at the same time having a good giggle at Terry’s mischief. But now a quarter of a century has passed; my grandmother is long gone, and Terry’s Quoit has the special imprimatur provided by Google Maps — and who’s to argue with that?
Perhaps this should get us thinking about the authenticity of the other monuments nearby. The Penwith Moors are often described as an “ancient landscape”, as if they were fixed in aspic. But what really makes this place special is its “time-depth”, the massed evidence of thousands of years of continuous building and rebuilding. Victorian mines rise over Neolithic barrows, and 1970s bungalows stand alongside Iron-Age settlements.
Some of the individual sites have complicated histories of their own. A short way east of Terry’s Quoit, the Mên-an-Tol — a remarkable holed stone flanked by upright pillars — is usually dated to the early Bronze Age. But sketches of the site from the 18th century reveal that it has since undergone some serious rejigging, probably by aesthetically minded Victorians. Also nearby, you might be told that Lanyon Quoit is among the oldest human-made structures in Britain, standing proud for 5,000 years. But that’s not strictly true. The quoit collapsed in a storm in 1815 and was put back in a different configuration nine years later.
At what point does a restored or reconstructed monument cease to be “authentic”? Beyond Cornwall, Stonehenge has endured a fair bit of interference, and the zealous 20th-century renovations of the Newgrange passage tomb in Ireland have certainly robbed the place of some of its atmosphere. Meanwhile, the iconic — and heavily restored — Hindu and Buddhist monuments of south-east Asia, Angkor Wat and Borobudur, now bear little resemblance to the jungle-swamped ruins described in the 19th century.
But tinkering with the past is nothing new — and especially not in Cornwall. A short walk east of Terry’s Quoit, you’ll find Mên Scryfa, an six-foot granite pillar engraved with the name of a forgotten chieftain called Rialobran. The inscription dates from the mid-first millennium CE, but the stone itself was probably repurposed from a much older Bronze Age stone circle. It’s even possible that the slabs that make up Terry’s Quoit themselves once belonged to a genuinely prehistoric monument. And in any case, when he placed them in their current configuration, Terry was undoubtedly continuing a very ancient Cornish tradition of moving chunks of granite into new arrangements in the landscape. Maybe Google Maps is right to mark the thing as a historical landmark, after all!
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