Devil’s Quoit

Also known as:
Devil's Coit/Coyt.
Nearest town:
Newquay (11km WSW)
OS reference:
SW923619
OS sheet:
200
Latitude:
50° 25' 10.36 N
Longitude:
4° 55' 26.99 W
Added to TMA by

Images

Image of Devil’s Quoit by thesweetcheat

From “Ancient Crosses, and other Antiquities in the West of Cornwall” 3rd edition (1872)

Image credit: J.T. Blight (1872)
thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat Feb 3, 2009
Image of Devil’s Quoit by hamish

The information marker at The Devil’s Quoit.

Image credit: Mike Murray
hamish
hamish Sep 12, 2005

Articles

Devil’s Quoit

C
CARL Apr 26, 2012

Visited 16.4.12

Directions: On a minor road east of St Columb Major – off the A39.

Even on a Sunday evening this is a surprisingly busy road so you have to take care.

The Dolmen is to the left of a bungalow opposite a lane signposted for the RSPB.
If you are careful you can just about find somewhere to pull over on the junction.

Devil’s Quoit

hamish
hamish Sep 12, 2005

Not easy to photograph, you either have to risk life and limb in the middle of a very busy road or clamber on top of the hedge wall. It’s big.

Folklore

Devil’s Quoit
Dolmen / Quoit / Cromlech
Rhiannon
Rhiannon Jun 16, 2005

In the parish of Columb Major stands Castell-an-Dinas. Near this castle, by the highway, stands the Coyt, a stony tumulus so called, of which sort there are many in Wales and Wiltshire, as is mentioned is the ‘Additions to Camden’s Britannia,’ in these places, commonly called the Devils Coyts. It consists of four long stones of great bigness, perpendicularly pitched in the earth contiguous with each other, leaving only a small vacancy downwards, but meeting together at the top; over all which is laid a fiat stone of prodigious bulk and magnitude, bending towards the east in way of adoration (as Mr Llwyd concludes of all those Coyts elsewhere), as the person therein under it interred did when in the land of the living; but how or by what art this prodigious flat stone should be placed on the top of the others, amazeth the wisest mathematicians, engineers, or architects to tell or conjecture. Coit, in Belgic-British, is a cave, vault, or co[r?]n-house, of which coyt might possibly be a corruption.” --Gilbert’s Parochial History.

also from Hunt’s book (as below)

Folklore

Devil’s Quoit
Dolmen / Quoit / Cromlech
stubob
stubob Mar 28, 2005

From Robert Hunt’s “Popular Romances of the West of England. Volume 1” Published 1903.

“It is curious to find one tradition directly contradicting another. We are told, on the one hand, that The devil never came into Cornwall.

Because, when he crossed the Tamar, and made Torpoint for a brief space his resting-place, he could not but observe that everything, vegetable or animal, was put by the Cornish people into a pie.

He saw and heard of fishy pie, star-gazy pie, conger pie, and indeed pies of all the fishes in the sea. Of parsley pie, and herby pie, of lamy pie, and piggy pie, and pies without number. Therefore, fearing they might take a fancy to a “devily pie,” he took himself back again into Devonshire”.

Sites within 20km of Devil’s Quoit

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