CORNISH CASTLES
The ancient camps--Their kinds--1. Rectangular, Roman--2.
The Saxon burh--3. The Celtic circular or oval camp--The
_lis_ and the _dun_--4. Stone fortresses--Heroic legends
in Ireland--The Firbolgs--5. The stone castle with mortar,
Norman--No good examples.
Anyone with a very little experience can at once “spot” a camp or
castle by the appearance from a distance of a hill or headland; and
the traveller in Devon and Cornwall will pass scores of them, as he
will see by his Ordnance Survey Map, without giving much attention to
them, without supposing that they can be of great interest, unless his
attention has been previously directed to the subject. It is a pity
that anyone should go through a country which may really be said to
make ancient camps and castles its speciality and not know something
about them.
[Illustration: LAUNCESTON]
Of hill castles or camps there are several kinds:--
1. Those that are rectangular or approximately so, and which have been
attributed to the Romans. Of these in Cornwall there are but few.
Tregear, near Bodmin, and Bossens, in S. Erth, have yielded Roman coins
and relics of pottery; but whether actually Roman or Romano-British
remains undecided.
2. There are those which consist of a tump or mound, sometimes wholly
artificial, usually natural, and adapted by art, and in connection with
this is a bass-court, usually, but not universally, quadrilateral. This
was the Saxon type of _burh_; it was also that of the Merovingian. The
classic passage descriptive of these is in the _Life of S. John of
Terouanne_, written in the eleventh century:--
“It was customary for the rich men and nobles of these
parts, because their main occupation is the carrying on of
feuds, to heap up a mound of earth as high as they are able
to raise it, and to dig round it a broad, open, and deep
ditch, and to girdle the whole upper edge of the bank with
a barrier of wooden planks, stoutly fastened together, and
set round with numerous turrets, and this in place of a
wall.
“Within was constructed a house, or rather a citadel,
commanding the whole area, so that the gate of it could
alone be reached by means of a bridge that sprang from the
counterside of the ditch, and was gradually raised as it
advanced, supported by sets of piers, two, or even three,
trussed on each side, over convenient spans, crossing the
moat with a managed ascent, so as to attain the upper level
of the mound, landing on its edge level with the threshold
of the door.”
A very good idea of such a camp may be derived from the representation
of the fortifications of Dinan on the Bayeux tapestry.
In France the _mottes_ on which the wooden dongeons of the Merovingian
chiefs were planted certainly abound; but in many cases the bank
enclosing the bass-court has disappeared. Good examples may be seen
at Plympton, at Lydford, and at Launceston. At the former and latter
Norman walls took the place of the palisading; but at Lydford a keep
was erected on the tump, but the line of earthworks was never walled.
In Ireland and in Scotland such camps abound; they are there due
to Saxon and Danish invaders. In Ireland they are called _motes_,
in England _burhs_. They afforded the type on which the Normans
constructed their castles.
3. A much more common form of camp in Devon and Cornwall is one that is
circular or oval, and consists of concentric rings of earth, or earth
and stone mixed, with ditches between.
There is, however, a variant where a headland is fortified, either one
standing above the sea into which it juts, or at the junction of two
streams. There it sufficed to run defensive banks and ditches across
the neck of the promontory.
This description of camp or castle is usually supposed to be Celtic.
In Ireland such a camp is a _rath_. The same word is employed for
similar camps in a portion of Pembrokeshire.
Every noble had a right to have a _rath_, and every chief had his _lis_
or _dun_.
A lis was an enclosed space, with an earth-mound surrounding it, and
was the place in which justice was administered. _Lis_ enters into many
place-names in Cornwall, as Liskeard, Lesnewth, Listewdrig, the court
of that king who killed S. Gwynear and bullied S. Ewny and the other
Irish settlers; Lescaddock, Lescawn, Lestormel, now corrupted into
Restormel.
In Ireland _les_ had a wider meaning. S. Carthagh was throwing up a
mound around a plot of land where he was going to plant a monastery.
“What are you about there?” asked an inquisitive woman.
“Only engaged in the construction of a little _lis_,” was the reply.
“Lis beg!” (small lis), exclaimed the woman. “I call it a lis mor” (a
big lis). And Lismore is its name to this day.
In Ireland every king had his _dun_. This was an enlarged rath with an
outer court in which he held his hostages, for the law required this:
“He is no king who has not hostages in lock-up.”
Dun in Welsh is _din_, and _dinas_ is but another form of the same
word, and signifies a royal residence.
A gloss to an old Irish law tract says that a royal dun must have two
walls and a moat for water.
Dun in Scotland is applied to any fort. According to the Gaelic
dictionaries, it is “a heap or mound,” and even a dung-hill is a dun.
In fact, the French _dune_ and the Cornish _towan_ derive from the same
root. Dun so much resembles the Anglo-Saxon _tun_ that we cannot always
be sure of the derivation of a place-name that ends in tun.
Every tribe had its dun, to which the cattle were driven, and where the
women and children were placed in security in times of danger. This
would be in addition to the royal residence, that is the dun of the
_rig_.
Within the dun were numerous structures of timber, roofed with oak
shingles, some of a large description, such as a banqueting hall; but
the habitations of the garrison were circular, of wickerwork, and
thatched with rushes.
In Cornwall there is Dingerrein, the dinas of S. Geraint;
Castel-an-Dinas; Damelioc (Din-Maeloc); Dunheved, the old name for
Launceston; Dundagel.
4. I come now to the stone fortresses that are found in parts of
Cornwall and Wales. They are also to be seen in Scotland and Ireland.
These are called caerau in Wales. A cathair is the term applied to them
in Ireland, and cathair signifies as well a city.
They are found in England only in Somersetshire, Devon, and Cornwall;
and in Wales only in such parts as were invaded and occupied from
Ireland.
In Kerry and the isles of Arran are those in best preservation, and
from these we can see that the walls were regularly built up with
double faces, rubble being between them. Very usually in Arran stones
are placed with the end outwards, so that they serve as ties to hold
the walls together.
The Welsh examples are very perfect, and precisely similar to those in
Ireland.
We know that the Gauls built stone camps--Cæsar calls them their
_oppida_--but they employed beams of timber along with the stone to
tie the walls together. The wood has everywhere rotted away, and the
enclosing walls of the Gaulish camps now present the same appearance
precisely as do the similar stone camps in Devon, Somerset, and
Cornwall. When the timber decayed the stones fell into heaps. In Arran
and Anglesey there was no timber; consequently stones were employed as
ties, and there the walls remain comparatively intact.
Within the _caer_ were circular stone beehive huts; also chambers that
were circular were contrived in the thickness of the walls. These
“sentry boxes” have been noticed in Wales, and also in Cornwall and
Devon.
The account of Castel-an-Dinas, before it was robbed for the erection
of a tower, is precisely such as might be given of one of those in
Ireland or Wales:--
“It consisted of two stone walls, one within the other,
in a circular form, surrounding the area of the hill. The
ruins are now fallen on each side of the walls, and show
the work to have been of great height and thickness. There
was also a third or outer wall built more than half-way
round. Within these walls are many little enclosures of a
circular form, about seven yards in diameter, with little
walls round them of two or three feet high; they appear to
have been so many huts for the shelter of the garrison.”
In fact, this was a royal dinas. Not only had it the requisite double
wall, but also the _drecht gialnai_, or dyke of the hostages. Every
king retained about him pledges from the under-chiefs that they would
be faithful.
There are several of these stone camps in Devon and Cornwall. In
Somersetshire Whorlebury is very interesting; in Devon are Whit Tor
and Cranbrook; in Cornwall the Cheesewring camp, Carn Brea, Chun
Castle, the camp of Caer Conan on Tregenning Hill, Helborough, beside
Castel-an-Dinas in Ludgvan.
The heroic legends of Ireland attribute these stone camps to the
Firbolgs, the non-Aryan dusky race that was in possession previous to
the arrival of the Celts. But that the Milesians learned from them the
art of constructing such castles is very certain, for in Christian
times the monks imitated them in some of their settlements.
Lord Dunraven, who has photographed these stone duns, says:--
“The legends of the early builders are preserved in the
compilations of Irish scribes and bardic writers dating
from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. The story,
which is said by these writers to have been handed down
orally during the earliest centuries of the Christian
era, and committed to writing when that art first became
known in Ireland, is the history of the wanderings and
final destruction of a hunted and persecuted race, whose
fate would seem to have been mournful and strange as the
ruined fortresses of the lost tribe which now stand before
us. Coming to Ireland through Britain, they seem to have
been long beaten hither and thither, till, flying still
westward, they were protected by Ailill and Maeve, who are
said to have reigned in Connaught about the first century
of the Christian era. From these monarchs they obtained a
grant of lands along the western coast of Galway, as well
as the islands of Arran, where they remained till their
final expulsion. Thus their forms seem to pass across the
deep abyss of time, like the white flakes of foam that are
seen drifted by the hurrying wind over the wild and wasted
ruins of their fortresses.”
Excavations show that these stone caers are more ancient than the
Christian era; they belong to the period of flint weapons and the
introduction of bronze. But, as already stated, the conquerors of the
rude stone monument builders adopted some of their arts, and some of
their camps are much later.
5. The stone castle, the walls set in mortar, is not earlier in Devon
and Cornwall than the Norman Conquest. There are no really stately
castles in either county, with the exception of Launceston. Rougemont,
Exeter, is eminently unpicturesque; Tiverton, Totnes, Plympton, are
almost complete ruins; Lydford--well, as Browne the poet wrote of it in
the reign of James I.:--
“They have a castle on a hill;
I took it for an old windmill,
The vanes blown off by weather;
To lie therein one night, ’tis guessed
’T were better to be stoned or pressed
Or hanged ere you come hither.”
And ruin that has fallen on it has not improved its appearance.
Okehampton is but a mean relic; Restormel is circular; Trematon is
like a pork-pie; Pendennis, S. Mawes, late and insignificant. Tintagel
owes everything to its superb situation and to the legend that it was
the place where King Arthur was born. The most picturesque of all is
Pregersick, near Breage, but that is late. Its story shall be told in
the chapter on Penzance.