Celtic Quoit a singing stone,
From ancestral voices flown,
Granite legend raised at last,
In a Cornish woodlands past.
Worked at will, with eager hands,
To clear and tend this sacred land.
Heartstone of our pagan story,
Brought alive in all it’s glory.
Watching days turn into night,
Seasons glories passing flight.
Years that turn so quick away,
Decades span and still you stay.
Sacred stones of past reach out,
Hear new voices raise a shout.
Held within from all who came,
Spirits of this place remain.
Sandra Chapman Spring 2014
In Devil’s Frying-Pan field today,
I came across a strange array
Of high-viz coats and bobble hats,
Of buckets, spades and kneeling mats.
These are archaeologists,
Enveloped in the rain and mists,
I’ll introduce them, in a mo,
Starting with the head honcho.
The people came from all around to hear the story told
How Manawydan the son of Llyr became a warrior bold.
They sat beside the Giants Quoit upon Treslothan Moor,
This place where he, the son of Llyr had seen the large white boar.
And as the winter’s night came in they listened to the Bard
He drew them closer to the fire where the ground was not so hard.
We approached in awe the sacred place.
With trembling hands and solemn face
We fell in a circle to our knees
Lest we should the ancestors displease.
(In reverence to Carwynnen Quoit)
You are sly, dear Quoit,
Hiding as a dishevelled heap.
Nothing to look at are you,
Discarded and gone un-noticed to those who seek majestic, neolithic memoirs.
And as I walk across the fertile land that is your home,
The thistles, vetch, hogweed and sorrel seem far more alive than you.
Balanced on fingertip supports
And splayed inward leaning legs,
As precarious as life itself,
A platform, barely head height.
Prone under the mourning clouds,
The cold capstone stretches to accept
The burden of the newly stiffened dead,
Our dearly blessed, our sorely missed.
'A little house raised of mighty stones,
standing on a little hill within a field.'
John Norden 1584.
Carwynnen quoit, the Devil's quoit
Is just a pile of rocks;
It's not a very pretty soight,
Though once it proudly stood uproight
Till felled by seismic shocks.
How they got up onto their capstone seat
five feet above the ground,
Lulu Hosking, and Mary Bennetts
(their names are written neatly on the photo),
is anyone’s guess,
though it looks to me as if Peter
has taken off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves
and lifted them there - hard for a chap like him,
not cut out, the pen in his waistcoat tells us,
for physical work.
They sit round the quoit
awkward in tea-treat best,
look shyly at the camera,
think less about their future
than we about their past
as we turn up crumbs
of their blurred afternoons,
trowelling on hands and knees
for The Stone Age.
to hand daughter mine
through autumn’s rustling talk
pass moss leaf cushions
under flat grayling sky
listening to cawing order
A tumbled heap of lichened stones
A fallen cromlech on the ground
Earth scattered – its dissembled bones
Lie silent and mysterious
