Lord of the Isles.
One rock, surrounded at high water by the tide, is a square block of red granite of thirty to forty feet high, placed on the top of a still higher mass, on which it rests upon a very small base. It is called the "Roche Pendue," and serves as a landmark [pg 093] for the fishermen. We took a small boat full of fish resembling codlings or small cod, called "lieu," and were rowed by the fishermen through a sea of granite boulders to the opposite side of the Trégastel estuary, to see the "pierre pendue," or rocking-stone (Breton, rouler), the largest in Brittany. These stones are so nicely poised that they can be moved with the slightest impulse by any one knowing the exact point at which to touch them. They were used in early times as proving-stones, and called "Pierres de verité."
“Firm as it seems,
Such is its strange and virtuous property,
It moves obsequious to the gentlest touch
Of him whose breast is pure; but to a traitor,
Though e'en a giant's prowess nerved his arm,
It stands as fixed as Snowdon.” —Mason.
Or, as Sir Walter Scott alludes to them,—
“Some, chance-poised and balanced, lay