Our sites look great whatever the weather, but they look even better in the snow!
This week, those in east Cornwall received a plentiful helping of the white stuff. When the weather cleared and the sun came out, it proved the perfect time to capture them in all their winter glory.
Covering a range of different periods, these four sites – St Cleer Holy Well and Cross, Trethevy Quoit, King Doniert’s Stone and the Hurler Stone Circles – are all located within a 10-minute drive of one another and tell the story of Cornwall’s journey from the Neolithic period to the late Medieval. Have you visited any of them?
Trethevy Quoit
Trethevy Quoit is a particularly well-preserved example of a portal dolmen, a burial chamber of four large upright overlapping granite slabs forming the sides of the chamber with lateral stones at the front and back. It is thought that monuments like this were constructed in the early Neolithic period between 3700-3300 BCE.
These dolmens were used over long periods as gathering places, communal tombs or ossuaries to house the bones of ancestors.
Cornwall Heritage Trust purchased the field in which Trethevy Quoit resides in 2017 to save it from the Heritage at Risk Register. Following its purchase, we undertook a project to improve access to the site and replace a stretch of the Cornish hedge there thanks to a grant from Historic England. These successful interventions resulted in the removal of the site from the Heritage at Risk Register in 2019.
The Hurler Stone Circles
The Hurler Stone Circles are situated a short walk north-east of Minions on the edge of Bodmin Moor. This line of three early Bronze Age stone circles is one of the best examples of ceremonial standing stones in the South West and is associated with many Cornish legends. The southernmost circle is incomplete, but the other two have been restored. Two standing stones, ‘The Pipers’, lie to the west of the site.
To the north-east of the circles, on the ridge and visible from the site, lies the important Bronze Age burial chamber of Rillaton Barrow: so the Hurlers must not be seen in isolation.
They are part of a remarkable ‘ceremonial landscape’ of stone circles, stone rows, standing stones, cists and cairns. The numerous alignments apparent in this area, between man-made features such as the large barrows on Caradon Hill and natural landscape features such as tors, suggest that the Hurlers may have been part of an important processional route.
King Doniert’s Stone
The Doniert Stone is the decorated pedestal for a large memorial cross and is panelled on all four sides with a mortice cut into the top, probably to take a cross shaft and cross-head, each piece cut from an individual block of granite.
Three sides of the stone are carved with beautifully designed interlace patterns while the fourth is cut with an inscription bearing the name of a late Cornish King. The inscription reads “Doniert Rogavit pro anima” which translates as “Doniert begs prayers for the sake of his soul”. Documentary sources refer to a King Dumgarth, a King of Cornwall, who drowned in the nearby River Fowey in around 875CE and with whom Doniert has been identified.
St Cleer Holy Well and Cross
Thought to date from the early 16th century, St Cleer Holy Well and Cross is situated within a small walled enclosure in the village of St Cleer, near Liskeard.
The open, arched form of the well house, with a steep gabled roof, was probably intended to resemble a high-status saint’s tomb or shrine; prior to the Reformation the interior may have been used to display the image or relics of a saint, to be viewed by pilgrims to the site, who would have had access to water from the spring covered by the building through the small double arch at the east end.
St Cleer Well had become a ruin by about 1700 but the spring continued to be used as a domestic water supply until at least the later nineteenth century.
It was probably also used for ‘folk cures’ for eye problems and aches and pains and perhaps also for divining marriage partners or the well-being of absent family members up to at least the time it was restored, in 1865, when the pool inside the well building was covered over.
Cornwall Heritage Trust acquired the site in November 2022 and took on its management. The site was removed from the Heritage at Risk Register in November 2023.
Photo credits – Mike Davey
