“The lips do not all point in the same direction, some tending to the south, some to the west, others to the north, and others again to the intermediate points of the compass; by which it seems as if the makers had been determined in this particular, not by any mystical veneration for one region of the heavens more than another, but by the shape and inclination of the rock, and for the most easy and convenient outlet.” We must here beg the reader to pause. The above remark is really too valuable to be suffered to pass without some notice. And so the absence of all design and arrangement is adduced as a proof of their artificial origin! What would Dr. Borlase have said, had all these lips been found to point in the same direction? But to proceed:
“The size of rock-basins is as different as their shape; they are formed from six feet to a few inches in diameter. Many uses may suggest themselves to the imaginations of the curious from the description of these new, and hitherto scarce-mentioned monuments; in order, therefore, to obviate some prepossessions, and prevent the mind from resting so far on groundless suppositions as may make it more difficult to embrace the truth, I shall first consider what, in all probability, cannot have been the design of them.”
The doctor then proceeds to show that they could never have been intended for evaporating salt; nor for pounding tin ore, nor for receiving obelisks, or stone deities, nor for altars; and then suggests that they could be no other than vessels most ingeniously contrived for holding holy-water for the rites of washing and purification. “If,” adds the learned antiquary, “fitness can decide the use--and where history is deficient, it is all reason that it should--we shall not long be at a loss. They are mostly placed above the reach of cattle, frequently above the inspection of man; nay, the stones which have these basins on them, do not touch the common ground, but stand on other stones.--Wherefore? but that the water might neither be really defiled by the former, nor incur the imaginary impurity, which touching the ground, according to the druid opinion, gave to every thing that was holy.” We do not know what ideas the druids entertained with respect to the purity of water, but we have seen water in some of these pools so impregnated with the excrement of sea-birds, that we must have been as thirsty as Tantalus, before we could have been induced to cool our tongues with it.
“But,” adds Dr. Borlase, “there are some basins which have no lip or channel; and, therefore, as they could not contribute any of their water to the common store, they must have been appropriated to another use; and since these are found in the same places with the others above-mentioned which have outlets or mouths to them, they must have been subservient to the same system of superstition, though in a different method.”
“These basins are sometimes found near twenty feet high from the common surface; and, therefore, being so withdrawn from vulgar eyes, so elevated from the ground, which was supposed, as I said before, to defile all, they had likely a proportionably greater degree of reverence, and their waters accounted more holy, and more efficacious.”
We shall not trouble the reader with any further quotations from this learned antiquary, except in concluding the history, after the fashion of melo-dramatists, with a splendid scene, in which, with the author’s assistance, we shall bring all the performers on the stage, dressed in appropriate costume, and surrounded by all the pomp of druidical worship.
“From these basins,” says Dr. Borlase, “on solemn occasions the officiating druid, standing on an eminence, sanctified the congregation with a more than ordinarily precious lustration before he expounded to them, or prayed for them, or gave forth his decisions. This water he drank, or purified his hands in, before it touched any other vessel, and was consequently accounted more sacred than the other holy-water. To these more private basins, during the time of libation, the priest might have recourse, and be at liberty to judge by the quantity, colour, motion, and other appearances in the water, of future events, of dubious cases, without danger of contradiction from the people below. This water might serve to mix their mistletoe withal, as a general antidote: for, doubtless, those who would not let it touch the ground, would not mix this their divinity (the mistletoe) with common water. Oak leaves, without which the druid rites did scarce ever proceed, ritually gathered and infused, might make some very medicinal or incantorial potion. Lastly, libations of water were never to be made to their gods, but when they consisted of this purest of all water, as what was immediately come from the heavens, and partly therefore thither to be returned, before it touched any other water or any other vessel whatsoever, placed on the ground.”
“As logan, or rocking-stones, were some of the piæ fraudes of the druids, the basins found on them might be used to promote the juggle; by the motion of the stone the water might be so agitated, as to delude the enquirer by a pretended miracle; might make the criminal confess; satisfy the credulous; bring forth the gold of the rich; and make the injured, rich as well as poor, acquiesce in what the druid thought proper.”
Sorry are we to destroy a web which has been so ingeniously woven by its author; but the interests of truth admit not of compromise. Dr. Macculloch, in an interesting paper, published in the Transactions of the Geological Society, on the decomposition of the granite tors of Cornwall, has justly observed, that the true nature of these rock-basins may be easily traced by inspecting the rocks themselves. On examination, they will always be found to contain distinct grains of quartz, and fragments of the other constituent parts of the granite. A small force is sufficient to detach from the sides of these cavities additional fragments, showing that a process of decomposition is still going on under favourable circumstances. The principal of these circumstances is the presence of water, or rather the alternate action of air and water. If a drop of water can only make an effectual lodgement on a surface of this granite, a small cavity is sure to be sooner or later produced; this will insensibly enlarge as it becomes capable of holding more water; and the sides, as they continue to waste, will necessarily retain an even and rounded cavity, on account of the uniform texture of the rock. This explanation is sufficiently satisfactory: in addition to which, it may be stated, that these very basins not unfrequently occur on the perpendicular sides of rocks, as may be distinctly seen in the granite of Scilly, and in the gritstone rocks in the park of the late Sir Joseph Banks, in the parish of Ashover, in Derbyshire; a fact which at once excludes the idea of their artificial origin.
The other grotesque and whimsical appearances of rocky masses, such as rock idols, logan stones, &c. are to be explained by the tendency which granite possesses of wearing more rapidly on the angles and edges than on the sides; thus, then, upon simple and philosophical principles, are such appearances to be satisfactorily accounted for, and the phantasmagoria of Borlase vanishes as the light penetrates the theatre so long dedicated to its exhibition.