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I'll start with archaeology. Time Team on Channel 4 did some excavation on the slopes of the hill Roughtor, Bodmin Moor
in the autumn of 2006 and the result of this was shown on TV in April 2007. We have done a lot of exploring this important
Neolithic ritual site and Bronze Age settlement area and it is one of our favourite places so the work done by Time Team was very interesting
for us. There was also a walk at Roughtor reviewing the results of the TV programme that we attended lead by County Archaeologist
Peter Herring. The most important discovery for Britain was the cairn bank - 100's of feet long which had been assumed to
be a boundary but turned out to be a possible
ritual pathway leading up the slopes of Roughtor. It has bends in it and each bend if you stop and view the hill makes you
look at a different tor on the summit. The tors were important and each had been surrounded by a great wall of stones in the past.
Well that was interesting enough but then I went onto Google in the summer and had a look at it from the air. At the top end of
the bank I noticed a circle of flat stones adjacent to a sort of rising sun shape. With our October Archaeology group we
investgated this and indeed there appears to be a circle of flattened stones at the end of the bank! Adjecent to the circle is a rising sun shape - semicircle with
rays coming of it and piles of stones dotted about. We also had a good look at this. In the winter we reported this to the County Archaeologists.
The sun shape was surveyed in the 1980's and was assumed to be field walls - but they don't look like it to us and the piles
of stones dotted around are cairns - used as markers or burial places in the Bronze Age. They didn't know about the circle - NOW they do and we are hoping
someone will go and check it out. Have we found a new stone circle for Cornwall????? |
