Like King Arthur's Hall this earthwork is a bit of a mystery. It stands on high ground to the west of the village of St Neot on the road to Bodmin. Allthough much of the centre of it has been disturbed by shallow mining it's outer walls remain. The whole thing measures 160ft by 120ft in a rough rectangle.
St Neot was a keen evangelist and was trying to convert the unenthusiastic masses of Hamstoke (now, one imagines, the village retitled as 'St Neot').
Local tradition, fondly clung to still, tells how they one and all made excuse, alleging that the crows came down in such flights on their fields as to destroy the prospect of crops, and that accordingly they could not spare the time from watching their fields to attendance on his discourses.
Then Neot summoned the crows to him and empounded them in the old Roman camp on Goonzion Down, and bade them remain there during the time of Divine worship and instruction. And they obeyed.
footnote: The entrenchment is now called 'Crow Pound'. The woman at S. Neot who told the story to the writer said: 'Some people doubt that this was so. But S. Neot was a very holy man. There is Crow Pound, and there on the opposite side of the valley is the Rookery.'
From p7 in 'The Lives of the British Saints' volume 4, by S Baring-Gould and John Fisher (1913).
This is very wordily reported in Impounding Wild Birds
Wm. Pengelly
The Folk-Lore Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1. (Jan., 1884), pp. 19-20.
in which he quotes the Parochial History of Saint Neots in Cornwall, by James Michell, 1833, p137-8. The name of the village is given as Guerryer Stoke (now St. Neots).
The legend says that the pound got it's name because St Neot sent all the crows in the parish here during sermons. Because of this the farmers in the region had no excuse to miss services.
I am not sure what has happened and will be making enquiries but the stone that may or may not have been a standing stone...has vanished.
It has been replaced by a modern granite upright with a messy road sign stuck in top of it....
I asked a couple of locals if they knew what had happened to the stone but I am no further forward.
Stands dwarfed by modern traffic signs beside a crossroads on the old Bodmin/ St Neot road. Is it a menhir or just a large upright stone that was once itself a road sign?
There is a lump of metal imbeded in the top of it that may have sometime had a sign in.
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