On Granite and Time

On Granite and Time

Sculptures of the elements, granite walls and neolithic monuments that stand across fields. Becoming forgotten or folklore. Words by George Nixon.

Driving through the winding, fox-glove walled lanes of West Cornwall – rattling over pot holes, and past sturdy granite cottages – the burnt orange moors blur into a mass.

Thick scars cover them. Organised lines and edges, miles long, cutting through the ferns and defining the boundaries of an ancient farmer’s field. This farmer, who lived on, and from this land – who knew the ridges of Zennor Hill, the moor that surrounds it is so incomprehensibly removed from me by time and culture, that I am an alien to him.

His wall still stands but is buried by bracken. It has stood there on that hillside for four thousand years, evenly breaking up his side of the hill. His reason for quarrying blocks, carrying them and carefully balancing them on the moor to construct his wall is a reason we might understand. It serves the function of protecting his land, his flock – defining his boundary.

The farmer's world, his wall and the stones he carried to draw them, has blended with mine. Millennia have passed, but the curves in this road are based on the shapes of his domain, his decisions, the definition of which bits of this landscape were his, are still visible through the ferns.

As we crest the hill, another talisman of a forgotten time stands overlooking the field. I park in a gravel layby and walk towards Lanyon Quoit; a neolithic dolman with a view across all of West Penwith. Stood proud on this rainy day, it has a powerful physical presence. Unlike our farmer’s walls, the reason for constructing this weighty monument has blurred through the centuries.

The precarious arrangement of granite would have required exceptional engineering knowledge, a workforce of strong and thoughtful hands, and months of preparation. It stands at the north of a long barrow, with other stone structures that could be the remains of cists, burial chambers and ceremonial arrangements of stones.

Down the other side of the hill is Men-an-Tol, a formation of standing stones with a central rounded stone with a circular hole in the middle – and along the path from there Men Scryfa, a stone dating originally from the bronze age, later inscribed in the 5th-8th century with the name of a now unknown king. 

These fields are littered with neolithic structures. Some overlooked, buried beneath soil or bracken – and some take on lives and stories of their own. The Merry Maidens, a circle of granite stones in a field near St Buryan, and the nearby Pipers, two improbably placed granite megaliths, are an example of this. The story goes that nineteen maidens, dancing in the moonlight to the tune of two pipers, were turned to stone when the clock struck midnight, guilty of dancing on the sabbath. Another theory is that the pipers mark the positions of Howel, the leader of the Cornish Celts, and Æthelstan, the Anglo-Saxon king, in a 10th century battle.

The scars in the moor left by our farmer are similarly old – but the reason for their being makes sense today. Boundaries, maybe to define the border to his land or to keep his flock safe. The millennia that have passed since he built those walls haven’t eroded them or their meaning – but the ceremonial, religious and cultural marks that are dotted across this landscape have lost their stories in the passage of time.

The oral history that told their tales, and connected us to the cultures that built them has been lost. Archaeological studies give us some understanding, and help us build a picture – but uncovering soil for answers seems to leave us with more questions. This uncertainty that surrounds the granite stones and structures in this corner of the world is what opens the door to folklore and creative interpretation. Generations of tales that are told to help us know the unknowable – and it is in that thought that the beauty lies. 

Their original meaning has eroded with time, yet here they stand solid, in Cornish fields through storms and rain – danced around by pagans and used as scratching posts of cattle. They represent the permanent, the unknowable – granite talismans from a time and culture lost through the bleak darkness of history. Monuments of time, open to us to interpret, to ply meaning and connect back to our humanity, to those who walked these fields before us. 

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