St Cleer, Cornwall

A quoit and its context

Cornwall is known for some of Britain’s most striking prehistoric remains, notably quoits, stone structures consisting of a number of vertical slabs enclosing a chamber and roofed with another slab of stone; the stone chamber was almost certainly originally covered over with an earth mound. Quoits date to around 3500 to 2500 BCE – the early or middle Neolithic period – and are generally associated with human remains. However, archaeologists believe that they might well have been more than just tombs, perhaps combining the roles of mausoleum and place of worship.

Trevethy Quoit, on the southern edge of Bodmin Moor, is probably the most impressive of all Cornish quoits. Its five upright stones must weigh several tonnes each and the enormous capstone has been estimated to have a weight of around 20 tonnes. All six stones must have been dragged here from a site about 2 kilometres away, one of those feats of effort and engineering that seem impressive even with modern machinery, awesome with the rudimentary technology available in the Neolithic. And the task was not just getting the stones to the site but also manhandling them into position, where they have remained for several millennia. However, the stones, with the capstone poised as a very steep angle, are not in exactly their original position. They have shifted a little, making the capstone tilt more dramatically, producing a visual effect that is even more astonishing to modern eyes.

An air of mystery surrounds prehistoric structures like Trevethy Quoit. Back in 2019, an excavation was carried out to attempt to shine more light on the structure’s history and use. When a geophysical survey of the area around the quoit showed a number of anomalies, archaeologists dug numerous test pits. The most remarkable thing they found was a large stone platform, now hidden beneath the soil, at the western end of the monument. The area covered by the platform is around 20 x 12 metres, and the platform itself is made up of an enormous amount of greenstone, which had probably been quarried from an outcrop to the east of the quoit. Hundreds of tonnes of this greenstone were carefully laid, large stones towards the bottom and small ones at the top, originally forming the surface of the platform.

No one knows how this platform was used – for assemblies or ceremonies, perhaps – but its size is once more testimony to the amount of effort that went into creating this monument and the corresponding importance of the site for its creators and users. As so often, studying the context of a prehistoric structure – the objects in the immediate vicinity, such as the stone platform – helps to fill in the picture, while also posing more questions. One hopes that more research will be done into these enigmatic and fascinating monuments.