Jane

It was pouring with rain outside, so the shelter of Boleigh’s gaping dark mouth, moustached by moss and ferns and liverworts seemed rather attractive. The fogou is tall, 7 or 8 feet in places and about 9 metres long, perhaps more and beautifully corbelled. The creep leads off immediately to the left as you enter the fogou. I could just squeeze my child-bearing hips through the crack and I found the creep not only almost doubles back on itself, but rises to virtually ground level.

I loved it here! I felt so protected and quite happy. Not freaked at all.

To reach the entrance of the fogou you must wade in ankle deep slurry and shooo a splendid yet shitty herd of friesians to one side of the farmyard.

Moth’s maglite firmly gripped in hand, I stepped out of the slippy shit and into the darkness. The chamber has a narrow entrance and a steep drop. The height never allows you to stand up, so I walked along, hunchbacked, as far as I could go. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I realised that the fogou was Y-shaped, with another exquisitely corbelled passageway leading off to the left, just as long as the one I’d just come down – about 7 metres. And from the point where the two main chambers meet, down at the bottom, a little square hole no more than 18 inches high. This is the creep. Squatting down in the mud I shone my torch through the hole to view a rock-cut passageway, again perhaps 7 metres long. For a moment, I felt like Howard Carter! It was only the mud that pervented me squeezing through, though this was no bar for Moth who disappeared through it like a small boy up a chimney. We loved this fogou!

Not entirely easy to find the entrance to this fogou faces seaward in the top edge of a field just off to the left of a track that exits the village at the north.

It was thrilling to find, but disappointing after Pendeen, for this fogou allows you in for the first six feet only before you meet a barrier. It’s been walled-up. Cheers National Trust! Fortunately, NT have not trashed the double entrances and despite the walling-up, it remains a delight to see a fogou lurking in the corner of a forgotten field.

On the eastern edge of St Mary’s, walking south between Innisidgen and Porth Hellick Downs the path passes over Gap Point towards Deep Point where Moth and I spotted five further chambered cairns in varying stages of ruin, peeping out from the carpet of heathers, gorse and moss.

Along the southern end of St Mary’s, Salakee Downs is peppered with chambered cairns, but the gorse and bramble was impenetrable at times. Fortunately for us, there had been a bit of fire which revealed some of the cairns marked on the map. We found one about 7ms in diameter with a virtually complete kerb, with maybe only two of the stones now fallen.

My first Scillonian chambered cairn – and what a place to start! Much restored, this lovely kerbed, stepped cairn nestles into a wall, facing east at the northern end of the island, overlooking Tresco. The four capstones are all exposed and the chamber is about 5 metres in length. There are a lot of stones lying about which were once part of it, but never properly replaced after its early 20th century excavation and rebuild. Nevertheless, this is a real beauty and very evocative.

I sat and marvelled at it in the sparkling light and found myself, Francis of Assisi-like – surrounded by birds: song thrushes, mistle thrushes and to my sheer delight, a male stonechat swooped and sang.

Walk south just beyond the ‘show’ site, the much-restored Great Tomb on Porth Hellick Down, and you stumble across more lovely chambered cairns in various states of disrepair and size. Moth and me found another four without even trying, though it helped that the gorse and heather was not high. The cairns up here are clear to see along the ridge of the Downs from the vantage point of Salakee Downs, a few 100 metres to the west.

I had little idea what I was about to see. ‘Blakey Topping’ sounds like a cheapo, bubblegum-flavoured, powdered dessert mix and not a smooth, graceful sacred hill standing alone, like Kilimanjaro. With the icy wind cutting through my clothes as we got out of the car at the Hole of Horcum car park, and with the threat of a bit of a walk to reach it, I thought: ‘this better be good, Moth.’ I wasn’t disappointed.

As you approach it the way we did, it doesn’t play visual tricks on you like Silbury does, it’s just there and absolutely compelling. It’s hard to take one’s eyes off it. You can feel why the ancients regarded it as sacred in some way, but I couldn’t begin to describe why.

The big surprise for me was the wrecked stone circle in a field nearby. The tallest stone stands about 6 feet high. Others remain standing and some are down but still its hard to know what’s been moved and what hasn’t and so quite diffcult to work out how big it once might have been, or even where its centre was. It’s quite a sheltered spot by the stones and completely dominated by the shape of the hill beyond.

In a big, wide rolling, landscape pockmarked with earthworks and tumuli, Duggleby Howe stands proud and tall despite being a shadow of its former self. Now only 20 feet high, rather than 30, and without its surrounding ditch and bank of which I could see no trace, this massive tump really dominates this little valley. We followed the edges of the field to reach it, as there is no path.

I liked it enormously and had there not been a biting cold northerly wind, I’d have liked to sit and considered its position in the landscape a little longer. Like you do at Silbury, for example.

How this survived in a churchyard, God only knows. Woooo! I challenge anyone not to be impressed by this monster though it is made to look silly with its little metal helmet. I lay on the ground and looked up from its base watching the clouds scudding past. I was intrigued by its juxtaposition with the gravestones and its proximity to the church itself.

In the corner of the graveyard, under a tree lies a couple of broken standing stones one of which has the most amazing bright white lichen on one side only. Seek this out, it’s fab. Next to this is a gorgeous, open stone-lined coffin. Loads to see here!

Reduced now to a virtually imperceptible swell in a meadow, you have to be a real Long Barrow Detective (cue for TV series?) to even notice this let alone get excited by it. I walked its length. At some point it was very big, but this has melted away to almost nothing. What a bloody shame.

This is – or was – an absolute beauty. Ten metres longer than Belas Knap it shows signs of once magnificent side chambers, à la Belas Knap, perhaps as many as six of them. There was a lot of rubble underfoot, some still stacked up, which you could see if you lifted some of the leaf mulch and dug around a bit with your fingers But at some point it has been carelessly dug out. One single standing stone at its head end is all that’s left upright; 3 feet tall, 3 feet wide and only 6 inches thick.

Despite its terrible condition, I was really impressed with this place. I guess I have seen enough long barrows now to be able to fill in the blanks in my imagination.

You really wouldn’t want to come here in the summer when the undergrowth is at its height, the brambles turn it into Ankle Laceration City, even in winter.

We drove right up the farm track and parked next to the field in which it lies. Reduced to an uncultivated patch in the distance, we didn’t dare walk over the field to see it for fear of becoming caked in mud up to our knees. I noted that the farm on which it stand is called Lad barrow farm, which may be why it still exists: you wouldn’t plough up the very thing your land was named after would you? Though big, from this distance it really is quite underwhelming, though its position on the highest land up here is stunning.

This is a total disaster. Weep, dear reader, then forget this one and instead see Poles Wood South long barrow which still lives.

Standing completely alone at the top of a field, nowhere near the field edge, crouches this rectangular megalith just 3 feet tall and 5ft 7ins wide. You just wouldn’t see it at all if the field was in full-crop. Today, planted with low-growing brassicas, I hmm-ed and ahh-ed about whether or not to trapse through the field to see it as there was no clear track. I decided to go for it, being careful to step between the plants. Like everything else round here its of oolitic limestone, pockmarked and weathered. There was something of immense pride about this stone. Definitely worth look-see.

Apart from its great height, (it’s very steep sided) there’s not much to see here. It’s big and tall at maybe 25 metres long, but there are no outstanding features. Badly overgrown, it’s now the domain of badgers. Could the Whittlestone have once been something to do with this? It’s very close.

This is a really big long barrow and not overly trashed. On the edge of woodland, it hasn’t suffered under the plough and its shape, height, total length and significance is clear. Punctuated by mature trees along the top, its outline is still relatively smooth and straight. And to my pleasant surprise I found two stones and a bit of rubble making up a little stone cist on the top, small enough to curl up in. What a great long barrow!

If you didn’t know it was a long barrow, you wouldn’t notice it. It’s a large unmarked hump, slowly being reclaimed by beech trees, today lying under a thick carpet of leaves, providing fantastic cover for the wildlife now being hunted around us. I thought I could make out the shape of the horns of an entrance way, as at Belas Knap.

Bang slap in the middle of Lower Swell village the Whittlestone lies dead. Were it not for the little brass plaque revealing its neolithic origins you would be forgiven for mistaking it for something the bin men forgot. It’s not pretty, but it is big and thick, too, and it’s recorded to have been shifted here at some point in the recent past. Dumped, more like. Given its proximity to Lower Swell long barrow, it may well have been part of that.

I was pleased that Moth, too, thought that these stones were more than just badly placed gateposts or idly strewn field clearance. And this time, due to lack of undergrowth we could see that opposite the tallest stones on the north side of the driveway were four or five more large stones, upright, large and Rollrighty. Moth vigorous set about pulling off the ivy and moss to expose them more clearly to view. I still have no idea what’s going on here at Churchill, but something very big once did, for sure.

More of a leaning stone than a standing stone it probably only remains at its tortuous 45 degree angle by virtue of the wall it lies against. Were it not for this, it would almost certainly be over, lost amongst the undergrowth. My guess is that this was once some kind of marker stone, perhaps leading to Lyneham longbarrow. Worth a glimpse if you are coming to see Lyneham.