Brown Willy (bryn geled = conspicuous hill) has five heads, and these are crowned with cairns.
Owing mainly to the remoteness of this mountain from the habitations of men, and from the mischievous activity of stone quarriers for buildings, there are scattered about this stately five-pointed tor some very interesting relics of antiquity, of an antiquity that goes back to prehistoric times. Among these most interesting of all are the beehive huts that cluster about the granite rocks like the mud nests of swallows.
The whole of the Cornish moors, like Dartmoor, are strewn with prehistoric villages and towns of circular houses, sometimes within rings of rude walling that served as a protection to the settlement, and connected with enclosures for the cattle against wolves. But though in many cases the doorways remain, of upright jambs with a rude lintel of granite thrown across, complete examples roofed in are rare, and those to which we direct attention now are known to very few persons indeed. The huts in question measure internally from six to eight feet in diameter; the walls are composed of moorstones rudely laid in courses, without having been touched by any tool or bedded in mortar. The walls are some two to three feet thick. Sometimes they are formed of two concentric rings of stones set upright in the ground, filled in between with smaller stones, but such huts were never stone-roofed. Beehive-roofed they were, but with their dome formed of oak boughs brought together in the centre, the ends resting on these walls, and the whole thatched with straw or heather or fern. But the stone-built and roofed huts have walls of granite blocks laid in courses, and after five feet they are brought to dome over by the overlapping of the coverers, in the primitive fashion that preceded the invention of the arch.
The roof was thus gathered in about a smoke-hole, which was itself finally closed with a wide, thin granite slab, and thus the whole roof and sides were buried in turf, so that the structure resembled a huge ant-hill. Most of this encasing flesh and skin has gone, and the bone beneath is exposed. Nevertheless; it does remain in some cases, and has been the means of preserving these curious structures. One such, very perfect, is on the river Erme, above Piles Wood, on Dartmoor. Into this it is quite possible to crawl and take refuge from a shower. It is completely watertight, but it is not easy to find, as it is overgrown with dense masses of heather. Another is close to the farmhouse of Fernaker, between Brown Willy and Rough Tor, and it has been spared because the farmer thought it might serve his purpose as a pig-sty or a butter-house. This Fernaker hut is rudely quadrangular, and one side is formed by a great block of granite rising out of the ground five feet and nine feet long. On this basis the house has been built and roofed in the usual manner by five courses of overlapping stones. The highest peak of Brown Willy is occupied by a huge cairn that has never been explored, owing to the expense and labour of working into it. It probably covers some old Cornish king. Immediately below it, some forty feet, are two beehive huts, in very fair condition, one eight feet in diameter, with a second, much smaller, only four feet six inches in diameter, close to it, opposite the door, with an entrance so small that it probably served as a store-chamber. One huge slab of granite, some twelve feet long and six feet wide, forms half the roof of the larger hut; the remainder has fallen in.
BEEHIVE HUT
(By kind permission of “The Daily Graphic”)
On the other side of Brown Willy, the west side, at no great distance from the source of the river Fowey, is another beehive hut, not absolutely perfect, but nearly so; one course and the smoke-hole coverer have fallen in on one side. The doors to these hovels are so low that he who enters one must crawl on hands and knees. In the beehive hut last mentioned the height in the middle is but three feet six inches, so that those who tenanted it could not stand upright inside. On Rough Tor, divided from Brown Willy by a valley, are three or four more of these huts, and the flanks of the mountains are covered with others, hundreds of them, in a more or less dilapidated condition. Some of these were originally stone-roofed; others were not. In connection with these remains of habitations are numerous relics of interments at some distance from them, for our primeval population always buried their dead away from the living. These consist of cairns, covering stone coffins or kistvaens that have been for the most part rifled by treasure-seekers. One has a somewhat pathetic interest, for beside the large stone chest just outside the ring of upright stones that encloses it is a child’s cist, formed of four blocks of granite two feet seven inches long, the covering-stone removed, and the contents scattered to the winds. Near at hand also is the largest circle of upright stones in Cornwall. The stones themselves are not tall, and are much sunk in the boggy soil, but it is very perfect, consisting of fifty-five stones, and 140 feet in diameter. On the neighbouring height of Leudon is a logan rock that still oscillates easily. The question naturally arises, Do these beehive huts actually date back to prehistoric times? That is not a question we can answer with certainty, for we know that the same methods of construction were observed to a comparatively late period, and that in the Isles of Lewis and Harris, in the Hebrides, precisely similar huts are even now inhabited, and are certainly in many cases of recent construction. But what is extremely interesting to find is the existence in Cornwall of these beehive habitations of man exactly like those found in Scotland; and in Cornwall, as in Scotland, associated with rude stone monuments of pre-Christian times. In the Hebrides the beehive huts still occupied are not stone-roofed. The roof is of straw, and is renewed every year because of the value as manure of the peat smoke that saturates it. But there remain earlier beehive huts in Lewis of exactly the same nature as those in Cornwall. It is therefore by no means unlikely that both belong to the primitive race that first colonised our isles.
Camelford has given a title, and that to a remarkable man, Lord Camelford, the duellist. He was the great-grandson of Governor Pitt, who acquired an ample fortune in India. He was born in 1775, and even when a boy was violent and unmanageable. He was put in the navy, but owing to his refractory conduct was treated with severity by his captain, Vancouver, and on his return home, meeting Vancouver in Bond Street, was only prevented from striking his captain by his brother throwing himself in the way.
In town he was incessantly embroiled. On the night of April 2nd, 1799, during a disturbance at Drury Lane Theatre, he savagely attacked and wounded a gentleman, and was fined for so doing the sum of £500 by the Court of Queen’s Bench. He attacked watchmen, insulted anyone who crossed his humour in the least degree, committed all kinds of violence, till his name became a terror, and he was involved in first one quarrel and then in another. His irritable and ungovernable temper at length brought about fatal consequences to himself. He had been acquainted with a Mrs. Simmons. He was told that a Captain Best had reported to her a bit of scandal relative to himself. This so incensed his lordship, that on March 6th, 1804, meeting with Best at a coffee-house, he went up to him, and in the hearing of everyone called him “a scoundrel, a liar, and a ruffian.” A challenge followed, and the meeting was fixed for the next morning. The seconds having ascertained the occasion of Lord Camelford’s wrath, Best declared himself ready to apologise, and to retract any words that had given offence which he had used to Mrs. Simmons, but his lordship refused to accept such an apology. Agreeably to an appointment made by the seconds, Lord Camelford and the captain met early next morning at a coffee-house in Oxford Street, where Captain Best made another effort to prevail on Lord Camelford to make up the quarrel and to withdraw the expressions he had addressed to him in public. To all remonstrance he replied, “Let it go on.”