A HISTORY OF CORNWALL 



The next writer who dealt with this subject, the Rev. R. Polwhele, 1 

 agrees with Dr. Borlase in calling the entrenchments Roman, and goes 

 further. He was apparently acquainted with a larger number of them, 

 and he writes confidently ' almost all of our camps are Roman.' 



On the other hand he entirely refuses to accept a Danish origin for 

 the hill and the cliff castles which he puts together (including amongst 

 them, quite unaccountably, Carnabargus in St. Erth) and calls them 

 Irish. 



Since these two writers little has been done towards a systematic 

 investigation of these camps and earthworks until recent years. In 1881 

 Mr. T. Cornish wrote a paper 2 in which, beginning at Hayle, and being 

 guided largely by the syllable car, gar or gear as meaning ' camp ' in the 

 place names, he built up a suggestion of military operations extending 

 from Phillack to Helston, in which the Cornish folk defended themselves 

 against a Saxon invasion from the estuary on the north coast ; and sug- 

 gested here the identification of the three battles in which, according to 

 the Chroniclers, 3 the Cornish with the help of Ivor, king of Brittany, 

 recovered their land from the Saxon in the year 755 A.D. 



In 1890 the Rev. W. lago, 4 starting with the objects of Roman 

 origin found at the ' Tregear ' camp at Nanstallon in Bodmin, and guided 

 largely by the distinction between square camps and round, constructed 

 a Roman invasion from Port Isaac opposed by the Cornish. Yet another 

 explanation, and perhaps the most fruitful of all, has been put forward 

 quite recently. In 1871 Mr. Pattison ' expressed an opinion that Upton 

 Castle in Lewannick was made to protect ' the possessions of a group 

 of villagers in their huts.' But it is to Mr. O. B. Peter 6 that we 

 owe the broad idea that all these entrenchments are fortified villages, 

 appropriate to a time when men needed rather to protect their herds 

 and property, especially at night, from a surrounding of lawlessness and 

 disorder than from any actual military operations. In addition to the 

 features of these ' village entrenchments ' described by Mr- Peter, it 

 may well be noted that the greatest number of them are found in the 

 districts on the north and the east side of the Bodmin moors. In these 

 same parts, and especially between the moors and the Tamar, Saxon and 

 Cornish place names are freely intermixed, and many of the Saxon names 

 end in ' stow ' or ' stock.' Our chroniclers relate 1 that although the Cor- 

 nish were driven out of Devonshire about the year 735 A.D. the warfare 

 did not end until Athelstan fixed the Tamar as the boundary between 

 the two races in 936. These entrenchments, 'stockades,' are imprints 

 which two centuries of border warfare might well leave on the face of 

 the country. 



There is also a large number near together in the parishes north of 

 Truro, in Newlyn, St. Allen, Perranzabuloe and St. Enoder; and here 



1 Hiitory of Cornwall (1803), pt. i. ch. iv. p. 73. 



2 Trans. Penz. Nat. Hist, y Antiq. Soc. vol. i. (new ser.) (1882), p. 126. 



3 Borlase, Antiquities, 410. 4 Journ. Roy. Inst. Cornvi. (1890), vol. x. p. 229. 

 5 Journ. Roy. Inst. Corntv. (1871), vol. ir. p. 73. 6 Ibid. (1902), vol. rv. p. 107. 



Borlase, Antiquities, 410. 



456 



