He is in doubt whether the furrows which he noticed on certain rocks were channels on the sites of the holy fires of the Druids, made in order to enable the priests the better to collect the sacred embers, or whether they were designed to collect the blood of sacrificed victims for the purposes of divination. But he admits ''tis all mere conjecture.'
And again—a 'canopy rock' with a row of rude stone pillars before it is a 'Druid Seat of Judgment';—in fact, on Borlase's theory, the whole of the Scilly Isles must have been thickly peopled with Druids.
But as the writer in the Quarterly truly observes, 'The Druids have of late years been somewhat rudely dismissed from the shade of their accustomed oaks, and the rock-basons have been proved to be simply the result of the weathering of the granite.'
FOOTNOTES:
[71] At Rospeith, in this parish, according to Davies Gilbert, P.R.S., the last native wolf in England was seen.
[72] The Manor of Borlase-Burgess, formerly the seat of the Borlase family in St. Wenn, 'is said to have been given by William Rufus to a certain Norman who was Lord of Talfer in that country, and whose posterity assumed the name of Borlase.'—(Borlase's MSS.)
[73] At Pendeen lived, in the time of Henry VII., one Richard Pendyne, 'one of the rebels who, under Lord Audley, Flammock, and Joseph,' dismantled Tehidy, the residence of John Basset, then Sheriff of the County, and did much other mischief in the West—an offence which he expiated by losing his estates.
[74] According to Kippis, it was the St. Just living which was subsequently procured through this interest.
[75] Second book of the 'Antiquities of Cornwall.'