It rained today - just spits and drizzle, and certainly not enough to
deter us from exploring more of the Cornish countryside. This morning
we drove a few miles inland to Chysauster. This ancient site was a
village inhabited by the Celts around 2000 years ago. They lived in a
settlement at the top of a windswept hill for two or three hundred
years, after which time the settlement was peacefully abandoned. Today
we walked up a gradual slope to the grassy knoll where we saw the
remnants of the circular stone houses. It was an isolated spot. It was
difficult to imagine that we were standing in the very spot where once
there was thriving village life two thousand years ago.
We then headed on to another ancient site. The Cornish Peninsula seems
to abound in these. At the Merry Maidens we saw a stone circle, a
simpler version than the one at Stonehenge. We parked in a small layby
off the road, climbed over a stone wall, and came to a field in the
centre of which was a circle of nineteen vertical stone markers. How
did they come to be there! Legend from the Middle Ages has it that a
group of village women decided to go into the fields for some merriment
and dancing. However, it was the Sabbath, and this displeased God, who
turned the women to stone.
Our last stop of the day was Land's End, the western most point of
England. We wandered along the cliff walk, but it was quite uneven and
very windy. Mostly, we gazed out to the Atlantic and thought of the
ships and their crews who ventured into the unknown in those very early
days of sailing.
It is still raining tonight and we are glad to be back in our cozy
little cottage, away from all the hardships faced by the ancient peoples
of this land.
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