You’d think this must be the right stone, but it looks much more grand in this drawing than in the photo (the top seems to match though). William Copeland Borlase says it stands 11 feet 6 inches and nearly 20 feet round, but was only 6 inches into the ground (rather frightening).
archive.org/stream/naeniacornubiaed00borluoft#page/277/mode/1up
From Naenia Cornubiae.
This is the best shot I could get of what I believe to be the Pridden Stone, taken from the road.
12x digital zoom doesn’t give the best image, but there were horses in the two adjoining fields, and there’s no direct access to the stone, other than via the farm – private property!
This stone is on private land and the field is used to keep horses in. I was advised that the landowner would probably not want people walking through the fields.
The stone can be seen from the road just east of St Buryan but it is narrow at that point and not easy to stop.
Pridden menhir
SW417266 – I didn’t have chance to visit this but it’s mentioned in Ian McNeil Cooke’s ‘Standing Stones of the Land’s End’ (1998 Men-an-Tol Studio) and Craig Weatherhill’s ‘Belerion: Ancient Sites of Land’s End’ (Cornwall Books – 1981) as a strange looking stone, 2.7m tall, now leaning at quite an angle in a field just off of the B3283. W.C.Borlase dug at its base in 1871 and it was possibly destabilised by this excavation and by the removal of an adjacent hedge.
Borlase found that the stone had been set just 15cm into the ground, and he discovered small splinters of cremated human bone and charred wood in a pit covered by a granite slab near the Southern foot of the then upright menhir.
