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GARRACK ZANS – VILLAGE RITUAL STONES

Whilst scouring my lil’ collection of Cornish literature for any interesting references to visits, folklore &c, I found the following in William Bottrell’s “Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall (2nd series)“. referencing a tradition of meeting stones, known as Garrack Zans: it doesn’t have any proveable prehistory but looks damn likely to be a really late survivor of megalithic tradition, and thus very much of interest; brackets are mine.

“Within the memory of many persons now living, there was to be seen, in the town-places of many western villages, an unhewn table like stone called the Garrack Zans. This stone was the usual meeting place of the villagers, and regarded by them as public property. Old residents in Escols (Escalls, near Sennen) have often told me of one which stood near the centre of that hamlet on an open space...(this) they described as nearly round, about three feet high, and nine in diameter, with a level top. A bonfire was made on it and danced around at Mid-summer. When petty offences were committed by unknown persons, those who wished to prove their innocence, and to discover the guilty, were accustomed to light a furse-fire on the Garrick Zans: each person who assisted took a stick of fire from the pile, and those could extinguish the fire in their sticks, by spitting on them, were deemed innocent; if the injured handed a fire-stick to any persons, who failed to do so, they were declared guilty.
Most evening young persons, linked hand in hand, danced around the Garrack Zans, and many old folks passed around it nine times daily from some notion that it was lucky and good against withcraft.
The stone now known as Table-men was called the Garrack Zans by old people of Sennen.
If our traditions may be relied on, there was also in Treen a large one, around which a market was held in days of yore...
There was a Garrack Zans in Sowah (Ardensawah near St.Buryan) only a few years since, and one may still be seen in Roskestal, St. Levan.
Nothing seems to be known respecting their original use; yet the significant name, and a belief – that it is unlucky to remove them, denote that they were once regarded as sacred objects.”

Bottrell’s work first appeared in 1873, from tales collected by him in the quarter century preceding; thus the Garrack Zans was a central feature up until at least about 1800.
Questions arising;
1 – the etymology of the name? (Obviously Careg, Carrick in the first instance – but Zans?)
2 – Is the Table-men still extant in Sennen? I would imagine it to be in Churchtown rather than Cove...and indeed that in Roskestal, a small farmstead?

“I should not choose to walk the moor at night; but a neurotic modern would have had nothing to fear on that sunny September morning. Nevertheless, it was with a sensation, not entirely pleasant, of passing from the land of humans to the land of shades that I left the last farm behind and crossed the moor, near the barrow where the famous Tregeseal urn was found, now in the British Museum, in search of the Tregeseal stone circles – two circles seventy-five feet apart. In one, sixty-nine feet in diameter, eight stones are erect and five prostrate; in the other only two are standing, but three more may be found upright in the hedge.

The outlying landmarks or sighting-lines from the eastern Tregeseal circle, probably used by the astronomer priests, are, Sir Norman Lockyer suggests, the Longstone, a monolith ten feet high, on a hillside one and a half miles to the north-east, the apex of Carn Kenidzhek, barrows and holed stones.

He gives the following table as “the meanings of the various alignments”:-
Decl. N. Star
Apex of Carn...42d.33’0” Arcturus 2330B.C.
Barrow 800’ dist..40d.29’0” Arcturus 1970B.C.
Two Barrows 900’ dist. 25d. 20’21” Solstitial?
Holed Stones..23d. 2’20” Solstitial?
Longstone......16d.2’0” May Sun
Stone.............9d. 15’0” Pleiades 1270B.C.”

C. Lewis Hind – “Days in Cornwall” (1907)

“As far as I know there is only one other stone beside the Men-an-Tol through which one squeezes as a specific, this being the Tolven stone at the back of a farm in the Helford River area, sited on a ridgeway which is crossed by an ancient track to Helston. Here the result being insured being fertility, I feel certain that the prerequisite of nudity also applies. It is a rock pierced by a round hole through which one can just wriggle, the whole performance being plainly a birth symbol.”
Ithell Colquhoun – :The Living Stones of Cornwall” (1952)

...I visited also the Maen Pol, a huge egg-shaped mass raised on end by a low platform in the middle of another farmyard. Once it was partnered by a monolith still taller: if you follow the muddy track uphill through the farm and beyond to a disused quarry, you can still see where the place where this phallic giant once stood. It used to be the centre of concourse for miles around; even when expedition had replaced pilgrimage and reverence had departed, wonder still remained and a kind of nostalgic affection. But avarice intervened – also, who knows? perhaps a perverse longing for the symbolic castration – and the quarry-face was scooped from under the monolith, which toppled forward over the precipice to be shattered at its base. I looked down with melancholy at the fragments still lying in the stained water of the quarry-tarn; grey heavens were weeping a drizzle as I retraced my steps down the track.
The two great stones were male and female when this place was a centre for that oldest of religions – the cult politely screened under the term ‘fertility rites’. But it comes from an age before utilitarian motives were required to justify sex, before puritanism had blighted primitive joy....

Ithell Colquhoun – “The Living Stones of Cornwall’ (1952)

An interesting trail of possible etymological corruption was noted by the Lamorna resident and surrealist painter Ithell Colqhuhoun in her “Living Stones of Cornwall” (1952)...

“Searching the Boskednan region for another circle called the ‘Nine Maidens’ as they all are, irrespective of the number of stones composing them, I asked some road-menders where it was.
“Ah, the Ni-Maen, ” answered one, and I wondered if these Cornish words had been corrupted...”