Wethers, Scaur Hill, and that on Langstone Moor, never enclosed cairns or kistvaens, and must have had some other purpose. Among semi-barbarous tribes it is customary that the tribe and the clan shall have their places of assembly and consultation, and these are marked round by either stones or posts set up in the ground. Among some of these tribes, if one of the constituent clans fails to send its representative, the stone set up where he should sit is thrown down. It is possible that the circles of upright stones on Dartmoor, not connected with cairns, may have served such a purpose. They are usually placed on the neck of land between two rivers. There are on Dartmoor about a dozen.
LAKEHEAD, KISTVAEN
V. The stone row is almost invariably associated with cairns and kistvaens, and clearly had some relation to funeral rites. The stone settings are often single, sometimes double, or are as many as eight. They do not always run parallel; they start from a cairn and end with a blocking-stone set across the line. In Scotland they are confined to Caithness. The finest known are at Carnac in Brittany. It is probable that just as a Bedouin now erects a stone near a fakir's tomb as a token of respect, so each of these rude blocks was set up by a member of a tribe, or a household, in honour of the chief buried in the cairn at the head of the row. It is remarkable how greatly the set stones vary in size; some are quite insignificant, and could be planted by a boy, while others require the united efforts of three or four men, with modern appliances of three legs and block to lift and place them. Usually the largest stones are planted near the cairn, and they dwindle to the blocking-stone, which is of respectable size. There is no known district so rich as Dartmoor in stone rows. The number of these still remaining in a more or less dilapidated condition is surprising. Some five-and-twenty have been counted, and quantities must have been destroyed, and these the very finest examples, as the big upright stones lent themselves readily to be converted into gate-posts. Indeed of those that have been allowed to remain many have lost their largest stones.
The most important stone row is that on Stall Moor, a single range, that can be discerned even from Cornwood Station, and looks like a number of cricketers in flannels stalking over the brow of the hill. A fine one is on Down Tor; here the largest stones had been thrown down for the sake of removing them for gate-posts, and the marks of the levers were visible. Happily the Dartmoor Preservation Society interfered and re-erected the stones which had been cast down. At Drizzlecombe are three sets of stone rows leading from tall menhirs. The stone avenue that led from the Longstone, near Caistor Rock for over a mile, was wantonly destroyed by a farmer a few years ago, when building a new-take wall hard by. A good example is on the brow of the hill opposite Grimspound, but the stones are not large. The Merivale Bridge remains consist of two sets of double rows, the stones very small, but the rows fairly intact. But the most remarkable row of all is that near the Erme Valley, which, starting from a great circle of upright stones, extends for two miles and a quarter, descending a dip and crossing a stream to mount the opposite hill.
VI. The menhir, or tall stone, is a rude, unwrought obelisk. In some cases it is nothing other than the blocking-stone of a row which has been destroyed. But such is not always the case. There were no rows in connection with the menhir at Devil's Tor and the Whitmoor Stone.
That the upright stone is a memorial to the dead can hardly be doubted; it was continued to be erected, with an inscription, in Brito-Roman days, and its modern representative is in every churchyard. The menhirs, locally termed longstones, or langstones, must at one time have been numerous. Those round the moor have been carried away to serve as window-sills, door-jambs, even church pillars. Several places and moors, by their names, assure us that at one time these monuments were there.
Menhirs are still erected by the dolmen builders on the Brama-pootra, the Khassias, and always in commemoration of the dead. The Chinese hold that the spirits of the deceased inhabit the memorials set up in their honour; and the carved monoliths in Abyssinia, erected by the same race when it passed from Arabia to Africa, have carved in their faces little doors for the ingress and egress of the spirits. Holed menhirs are found in many places.