The Merry Maidens, St Burylan
Of stone alignments Cornwall is almost wholly barren, but one at St Breock can be claimed with confidence. This is the more remarkable as they abound on Dartmoor. But the reason probably is that the stones have been carried off to serve as gateposts, and in some cases are embedded in walls of fields. They were probably erected in commemoration of the dead and are always associated with cairns and interments.
Subterranean chambers, constructed of upright stones with coverers, were possibly store chambers for grain. The best preserved is at Trelowarren.
Upright holed stones are met with in Madron, St Buryan, St Just, Sancreed, Constantine, Wendron, etc. Their purport is unknown.
Very curious are the clusters of communal huts at Chysauster, Bosporthennis, etc. They probably belong to the Iron Age, whereas the hut circles scattered over a hill side, or within a pound, pertained to the early Bronze Age.
Arrow heads, lance heads and scrapers have been found in tolerable abundance on the Bodmin moors, on Carn Brea, at St Agnes, etc., and celts (axe heads) of greenstone and diorite have occurred, but not with great frequency.
At Harlyn Bay has been found a cemetery of the Iron Age, all the bodies in slate cists, crouching. In the cairns and kistvaens (stone coffins) on the other hand the bodies have been burnt. Numerous urns of the well-determined Bronze Age type have been recovered from cairns.
The camps of stone and earth in Cornwall are very numerous. They all—or nearly all—date back to the same period of the early bronze, but may have been used by later peoples. They are of two descriptions, the cliff castles, where a headland is protected by banks and dykes on the side of the mainland, and circular or oval camps crowning heights, with concentric rings of circumvallation. Where the hill top does not admit of the circular form the earthworks adapt themselves to the contour of the hill.
Roman remains are conspicuously rare in Cornwall. Some fragments of Samian ware, coins, and a bronze and silver metal vessel have been found in Bossens, a camp in St Erth, and the head of an ensign at St Just. A second Roman camp is Tregeare, near Bodmin. An inscribed milestone of the time of Constantine the Great is in the churchyard of St Hilary. The metal bowl at Bossens was inscribed by Aelius Modestus to the god Mars.