“A mere shepherd, though he had never heard the name of astronomy,
might have erected such a stone for his own convenience, in order to
know the time when he might safely bring his flocks out, or take them
back to their safer stables. But this would in no way diminish the
interest of the men-an-tol. It would still remain one of the few relics
of the childhood of our race; one of the witnesses of the earliest
workings of the human mind in its struggle against, and in its alliance
with, the powers of nature; one of the vestiges in the first
civilization of the British Isles.”
Less than half-a-mile over the downs, in a northerly direction, brings
us to the