To A Fallen Cromlech

 

 

Lanyon Quoit by William Pascoe (active as an artist from 1905-1912)

Illustration from the frontispiece to Days in Cornwall (Methuen & Co)

 

To A Fallen Cromlech

 

And Thou at last art fall’n; Thou, who hast seen

The storms and calms of twice ten hundred years.

The naked Briton here has paused to gaze

Upon thy pond’rous mass, ere bells were chimed,

Or the throng’d hamlet smok’d with social fires.

Whilst thou hast here repos’d, what numerous

tribes,

That breath’d the breath of life, have pass’d away.

What wond’rous changes in th’affairs of men!

Their proudest cities lowly ruins made;

Battles, and sieges, empires lost and won;

Whilst thou hast stood upon the silent hill

A lonely monument of times that were.

Lie, where thou art. Let no rude hand remove,

Or spoil thee; for the spot is consecrate

To thee, and Thou to it; and as the heart

Aching with thoughts of human littleness

Asks, without hope of knowing, whose the strength

That poised thee here; so ages yet unborn

(O! humbling, humbling thought !)may vainly seek,

What were the race of men, that saw thee fall.

 

 

Poetry would normally be considered out of place in this Journal, but the lines printed above seem worthy of record here. Their author was the Rev. Charles Valentine Le Grice (1773-1858), who lived at Trereife, Madron, and was curate of St. Mary’s Chapel, Penzance,  from 1806 to 1831. He was a prolific writer and lists of his many published works may be found in Bibliotheca Comubiensis (/, 311; ///, 1266). The poem was written in 1816 and printed in the Appendix to the second (1823) edition of The Petition of an Old Uninhabited House in Penzance (p.37). Lanyon Quoit, Madron, “perhaps the noblest specimen of the kind”; the date of the fall is given by Le Grice as 19th October 1816, but this is evidently a mistake for 1815. For a drawing and account of the quoit in its fallen state see Proc. W.C.F.C. 1.4 (1956), 167; it was later re-erected at less than the original height.

 

From Cornish Archaeology: No 5, 1996. Page 16. For another poem on Lanyon Quoit click here.