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Standing Stone / Menhir
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http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~marcie/kernow/austell2.html
A giant travelling one night over Gwallow downs, near Charlestown, was overtaken by a storm that blew his hat off. He immediately ran after it, by having a large staff in his hand, which rather impeded his progress, he pitched it in the ground, until his hat was secured’ but after wandering about for some time in darkness, without being able to find his hat, he gave over the pursuit, and returned to secure his staff, but this, also, he was unable to discover, and they were both irrecoverably lost. When daylight appeared, the hat and staff were both found by the inhabitants, about a mile asunder’ the former lying on the ground, the latter in a perpendicular- position. The hat lay on Whitehouse downs, and bore some resemblance to a mill- stone, very thick, but not of great diameter. This singular stone continued in this place till the autumn of 1798, when some regiments of soldiers being encamped round it, fancied, as it was a wet season, that this giant’s hat was the cause of the rain; so they raised it on its edge and rolled it over the cliff into the sea. His walking staff still remains stuck in the ground near the Charlestown mills, being an enormous pillar of granite, about twelve feet high above ground, commonly called Longstone. It is no less curious than true that the Longstone is a perfectly isolated piece of granite, there being none within miles of the position it has so long occupied.
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Posted by phil
24th February 2002ce
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