There was another detail upon the southern side which seemed to lift this aged stone back into the mists of a past still more remote, for there, just above the ground, might be read the fragment of an inscription in debased Latin capitals. They were no longer decipherable save for the solitary word "FILIUS" which was easily to be distinguished, and this fragment of an obliterated inscription spoke concerning a period earlier by centuries than the carving and decoration. Indeed it indicated that the memorial was a palimpsest—a pre-Christian pillar-stone transformed at a later age to its present significance.
There are above three hundred old crosses still standing in Cornwall, and not a few of these, dating from time beyond the Roman period, originally marked the burying-places of the pagan dead. At a later period, long after their original erection, they were mutilated. But the greater number of these grand stones belong to Christianity, and by their varied decorations the age of them may approximately be learned.
Some bear the Chi Rho monogram, which stands for the first two letters of the Greek "Christos," and these belong to the seventh century; but the more numerous appear to date from that later period when the sacred figure of the Christ began to be substituted in religious architecture for the symbolic lamb that always preceded it. The Eastern Church authorised this innovation, after A.D. 683, and pronounced that "The Lamb of Christ, our Lord, be set up in human shape on images henceforth, instead of the Lamb formerly used." The earliest type is not particularly human, however, and the little, archaic, shirted doll of Byzantine pattern, which ornaments so many of these Cornish crosses, has not much save archæological interest to commend it. Until Gothic times this was the conventional pattern, and it is assumed that these early crucifixes dated from the eighth century and onward until a more naturalistic figure began to appear.
Scattered over the far-flung landscape of the West our Cornish crosses stand; by meadow and tilth and copse, among the little hamlets of the peninsula, in lonely heaths and waste places overrun by wild growing things, they shall be found. Sometimes the Atlantic is their background and sometimes the waters of the Channel. They were set on the roads that led to the churches, and served not only as places for prayer, but also as sign-posts on the church-ways. Now many of the more splendid specimens have been rescued, as in the case of this great cross, and stand in churchyards, or under the shadow of sanctified buildings. Their fragments are also scattered over the land, here set in walls, here at cross-roads, now as a gate-post, or a stepping-stone, or foot-bridge. Sometimes they serve for boundary stones, and are yearly beaten; occasionally they support a sundial; not seldom the Ordnance Surveyors have outraged them with bench marks. Often only the stunted head and limbs of the wheel-crosses remain, their shafts vanished forever; still more frequently the cross-bases or pedestals alone have been chronicled and the stones that surmounted them exist no longer. None can say how numerous they were of old time; and it may happen, while many have been destroyed past recovery or restoration, that others still exist in obscure places, or sheltered by the saving earth, for a future race of antiquaries to discover and reclaim.