It was a grey day when I filmed at The Hurlers for Standing with Stones. An amazing site this – it doesn’t immediately impose itself on the visitor – it’s only by slow absorption that you get alerted to the grandeur that is laid out here across Bodmin Moor. Not one, not two but three large stone circles in immediate proximity to one another, more exquisitely defying the visitor to decipher its meaning than many other monuments. It’s a sleeping giant of a site. All the more pity that it did not feature more in the film. I suspect that if we had begun to scratch the surface even a little, we could have easily added half an hour to the DVD. Someone with more time on their hands might be inspired to write a novel.
As with the settlement at Roughtor to the North, the scene is dominated, not by a work of man, but by a curious work of nature – in this case named: ‘The Cheesewring‘. About 1 Km to the North of the rings and high up on Stowe’s Hill, The Cheesewring is a natural outcrop of granite that has been weathered into marvellous stratified shapes.
The interesting thing to note here is that again, as noted in the entry on this blog about Roughtor, we missed the encircling structure of a man made stone rampart. It seems that there is a class of structure known as a ‘tor enclosure‘. The example at Roughtor was previously dated to the Iron Age and therefore interpreted as a defensive structure. However, it is now dated to the Neolithic. What is curious is, that in an age when defensive structures are unknown (certainly as distinct from Iron Age hill forts), that encircling stone walls such as this are reserved for what it is hard not to interpret as naturally formed ‘sacred’ sites.
