I have often stood at the quoit and wondered why it was positioned in such a place. With the surrounding trees, hedges and houses it is hard to make out the landscape.
Yesterday I was out walking a footpath to the west of the quoit and took this shot. It shows that it sits atop a small hill, take away the surrounding modern day objects and build a mound over it and ....
The two stones in the field in the foreground are possibly rubbing posts....I could not get close to look.
How big are those stones? They look pretty hefty for spar posts.
Do you have a grid ref for them- I might take a look when I'm next in the area.
Keep up the good work,
M.
SX253693 or thereabouts...take the footpath from Higher Tremarcoombe to Trecarne farm..they are in a field on the left. Strange to have two rubbing posts in a field...they could be an old gateway?
Would welcome your thoughts
Mr H
Ahoy chaps.
Visited last week and saw another pair of stones together in a field on the southeast side of the quoit (near Crow's Nest). Will post picture in a mo'
Rob
My colleague, Dave Kane (using the name 'horsedrawn' on here), recently investigated these 2 stones (he nicknamed them Foggy and Compo!) in connection with our ongoing investigations into the Quoit. The upright stone has 'drill holes', making us wonder if it was perhaps only quarried relatively recently. However, it may be possible that the recumbent stone has matching drill holes along the underside, but obviously it would need lifting to find out. If such was found to be the case, then it becomes conceivable that they were once a single stone, perhaps contemporaneous with the Quoit! Interestingly they are positioned exactly on an alignment mentioned by Sir Norman Lockyer!
After hearing many jokes about "Last of the Summer Wine", we nicknamed these enigmatic stones Foggy and Compo. Foggy, to the south, is upright and Compo, to the north, is, naturally, recumbent. Foggy has modern drill marks and we immediately assumed they are rubbing posts. There are no visible drill marks on Compo and if they exist then they are on the buried side. There is no way to discover, if they are rubbing posts, when they were put there. However, naturally, they raise more questions than answers. Why two rubbing posts? Why is one recumbent? Has Compo been split from Foggy and lies where he fell? From these stones the quoit is neatly skylined and if Compo was once upright they would frame the quoit on the top, (or almost on the top) of its hill. The quoit is on a bearing of 115 degrees and from these stones the sun will rise behind the quoit and be eclipsed by it twice a year. This is the line identified by Prof. Lockyer in 1905. The Feb-May orientation. This only works for sunrise.
The investigation continues.
David Kane.