HISTORY AND THE PARISH 159 



the waste; and in a few years their chimneys standing 

 amidst rotted woodwork, the falling masonry, the engine 

 rusty, huge and still (the abode of rabbits, and all over- 

 grown with bedstraw,the stern thistle and wizard henbane) 

 are in keeping with the miles of barren land, littered with 

 rough silvered stones among heather and furze, whose 

 many barrows are deep in fern and bramble and foxglove. 

 The cotton grass raises its pure nodding white. The old 

 roads dive among still more furze and bracken and bram- 

 ble and foxglove, and on every side the land grows no such 

 crop as that of grey stones. Even in the midst of occa- 

 sional cornfield or weedless pasture a long grey upright 

 stone speaks of the past. In many places men have set up 

 these stones, roughly squaring some of them, in the form 

 of a circle or in groups of circles and over them beats the 

 buzzard in slow hesitating and swerving flight. In one place 

 the work of Nature might be mistaken for that of man. 

 On a natural hillock stands what appears to be the ruin 

 of an irregularly heaped wall of grey rock, roughened 

 by dark-grey lichen, built of enormous angular frag- 

 ments like the masonry of a giant's child. Near at hand, 

 biacken, pink stonecrop, heather and bright gold tormentil 

 soften it; but at a distance it stands black against the 

 summer sky, touched with the pathos of man's handiwork 

 overthrown, yet certainly an accident of Nature. It 

 commands Cape Cornwall and the harsh sea, and St. Just 

 with its horned church tower. On every hand lie crom- 

 lech, camp, circle, hut and tumulus of the unwritten 

 years. They are confused and mingled with the natural 

 litter of a barren land. It is a silent Bedlam of history, 

 a senseless cemetery or museum, amidst which we walk 

 as animals must do when they see those valleys full of 



