2nd July 2024 - King Arthur's Hall

 What to write?  Well I could titillate you all with Lillie's great grandmother's goings on.  Just seen the beginnings of her memoirs, there are three notebooks on the subject.  But that is a family matter.  What was sad was recognising the typewriter she wrote so much on.  With all its wonkiness' and letters that wouldn't behave.  She wrote us all long letters on that old typewriter detailing all that was happening at Blonay and about the people she knew round the world.  It is a complete contrast to Con, her husband's book.  Which is rather dry and details his bureaucratic life in the Colonial Service.

No I shall find photographs of King Arthur's Hall, a strange 'square' megalithic structure round a sunken pond.  It is on Bodmin Moor, and now marks a boundary between two estates.  It is believed to be of Neolithic origin.

Paul and I had two holidays in Cornwall, we had contemplated moving there but as Daphne Du Maurier said there was a lot of 'bungaloid estates' and we were not at that stage yet.  But with our good friend Roy Goutte we visited the many sites round Bodmin Moor. I haven't heard from Roy for a long time and fear the worst (that is in my nature by the way).

There have been improvements to the site and a small excavation undertaken of it in which they found a retaining wall supporting the inner bank. It is just one of those mysterious that will never be solved but nag at the back of our brains, why do we need to know everything I wonder?

The pond in the centre was full of water plants and was just boggy, nature had played its usual trick of filling in with whatever came to hand.  I think it was cotton grass, I remember taking photos of the plants and stopping Roy from digging down without recording the evidence first.  So my second late husband would have been pleased with my intervention.

There were 56 stones counted, this is a magic number to me, but I am not sure how I have seen it in archaeological terms.  But I think maybe a five year period of the old prehistoric calendar - maybe the Coligny??

Stones laboriously picked out like book pages - Celtic religion holding fast.

King Arthur's Hall, possible entrance

This is how I will always remember Cornwall.  Misty and wet, one's boots slurping through boggy places.

 

Well these fine folk, are Roy, Paul and at the end Paul's cousin with her husband, wish I could remember names, but they lived in a very pretty cottage.  Both into conservation and history.