Mulfra Quoit

Mulfra Quoit (grid reference SW451353) is a Neolithic dolmen in the county of Cornwall in England. It stands on Mulfra Hill to the north of the hamlet of Mulfra.

Mulfra Quoit
Shown within Southwest Cornwall
LocationCornwall
Coordinates50.16327°N 5.56977°W / 50.16327; -5.56977
TypeDolmen
History
PeriodsNeolithic

Location

The Quoit is located west of Penzance between Porthmeor and New Mill on the top of Mulfra Hill, from where you can look to the sea over the surrounding hills.

Structure

Mulfra Quoit is similar to Chûn Quoit five kilometers away. The quoit has three 1.7m-high support stones, arranged in a U-shape 3.0m long and 1.7m wide, and open on one side. The capstone, which has slipped down, measures 3.2m by 3.0m, and is almost square; it has a weight of 5 tonnes. Since some of the stones that formed the chamber are missing, it is difficult to get an idea of its original form, but it is possible that four pillars supported the capstone slab as with Chûn Quoit. On the other hand, the capstone has a central bulge on its underside, which would give the stone a stable position on the existing three pillars. Mulfra Quoit was apparently covered by a mound, the remnants of which are still present

Research
View and floor plan of the Mulfra quoit – Drawing by William Borlase, 1769

In 1769 the antiquarian, William Borlase published a plan and a drawing of the quoit and described a 60 cm-high stone embankment, which encircled the dolmen with a diameter of 12m, of which, nothing can be seen today. Borlase also mentioned a further stone, which he thought was part of the capstone, but this stone no longer exists. The ground was covered with a 30 cm-thick soil, which Borlase thought was part of the original mound.[1] In 1872 his descendant William Copeland Borlase examined an accumulation of stone in the centre of the dolmen, and undertook excavations which only yielded charred wood. W. C. Borlase refuted a local story that the dolmen had been damaged by a lightning strike in 1752, because his ancestor in 1749, had found it in much the same state as it is today.[2]

Due to its poor state of conservation later writers gave it scant attention: Hencken in 1932 compared it to Chûn Quoit and simply called it "a very similar but less perfect chamber."[3] In 1950 Glyn Daniel did little more than mention the name of the quoit and classified it as a "typical rectangular" chamber, although he did provide a plan of the structure.[4]

Notes
  1. William Borlase, (1769), Antiquities Historical and Monumental of the County of Cornwall, Bowyer and Nichols, London
  2. William Copeland Borlase, (1872), Naenia Cornubiae, Longmans
  3. Hugh O'Neill Hencken, (1932), The Archaeology of Cornwall and Scilly, Metheun
  4. Glyn Edmund Daniel, (1950), The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of England and Wales, Cambridge University Press
gollark: This might be fixable if you have some kind of zero-knowledge voting thing and/or ways for smaller groups of people to decide to produce stuff.
gollark: If you require everyone/a majority to say "yes, let us make the thing" publicly, then you probably won't get any of the thing - if you say "yes, let us make the thing" then someone will probably go "wow, you are a bad/shameful person for supporting the thing".
gollark: Say most/many people like a thing, but the unfathomable mechanisms of culture™ have decided that it's bad/shameful/whatever. In our society, as long as it isn't something which a plurality of people *really* dislike, you can probably get it anyway since you don't need everyone's buy-in. And over time the thing might become more widely accepted by unfathomable mechanisms of culture™.
gollark: I also think that if you decide what to produce via social things instead of the current financial mechanisms, you would probably have less innovation (if you have a cool new thing™, you have to convince a lot of people it's a good idea, rather than just convincing a few specialized people that it's good enough to get some investment) and could get stuck in weird signalling loops.
gollark: So it's possible to be somewhat insulated from whatever bizarre trends are sweeping things.

Media related to Mulfra Quoit at Wikimedia Commons

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.