 |
| Watch Croft - a hill near the four parish stone - image by Iain Macaulay [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
"At a point where the four parishes of Zennor. Morvah, Gulval, and Mathon meet, is a flat stone with a cross cut on it. The Saxon kings are also said to have dined on this."
Hunt 1903
Map - The Four Parish Stone
[According to the OS map it looks like there are now only three parishes meeting here - Gulval and Mathon having become Madron County Parish.
Again this is currently an unfashionable legend, so I could not find a copyright free image of the exact stone. It is tempting to think that the legend itself is not of local origin - why celebrate an invading armies victory, especially when they did not become the local areas dominant culture - but for a non-local legend it seems strange to use an otherwise unknown stone. To me the Victorians as a whole seem far to enamored with the Celtic - or Keltic - origin of Cornwall to make this up, though they did take ancient historians - including Saxon propagandist Bede - at their word. Perhaps at an earlier date it became temporarily fashionable in Cornwall to look the Saxon influenced east, an then the legend grew and stuck..? Perhaps in the early days of the 'new world' and an expanding empire led from London? Who knows!]
No comments:
Post a Comment