1847.] 



Neilgherry Hills, 8^c. 



135 



admit the body of a child ; or it was a rock with a passage bored 

 through. Not long ago, in some parts of Cornwall, children afflicted 

 with weakness in their limbs were passed through the holes of a 

 Tolmen, and it was thought great benefits were produced thereby. 

 In the Scilly Islands there are two Tolmens. In the tenement of 

 Meu, in the parish of Constantine, Cornwall, is perhaps the most re- 

 markable one we can boast of. It seems to me by no means unlike- 

 ly that the aperture of the Tolmen was also employed as an oracle by 

 the Druids, who acted in the same manner as the Pythia seated on a 

 tripus at the mouth of the cavern of Delphi on mount Parnassus, 

 where she was wont to deliver the answers of that oracle sacred to 

 Apollo, who was also the god of the Druids. The oracle of Tropho- 

 nius at Lebadea, a city of Bseotia, also consisted of a hole under 

 ground from which the responses were delivered. 



In the neighbourhood of the Fall, close to the ruins of some Thau- 

 tawar villages, is a group of three Cromlechs, and a vast mound or 

 cairn of stones. Three miles North East of this spot I discovered 

 two other Cromlechs. The very sequestered position of the latter 

 reminded me of the name bestowed, in the Northern countries of our 

 quarter of the globe, upon the Cromlechs, where they are called 

 ** Blod," that is Bloodstones, in allusion to the sacrifices of human 

 beings once performed upon them ; and I could not refrain from 

 associating the existence of these altars on the Neilgherries, with the 

 former sacrifices of children by the Thautawars. 



On the side of a hill marked by a high tree on the summit, on the 

 right hand side of the road just before entering Kotagherry from 

 Ootacamund, there is a curious seat formed from a mass of rock by 

 the hand of nature : I have called it ** the Druid's chair," its shape 

 being that exactly, having a seat back and two arms. It nearly 

 faces a house known as the wilderness in Kotagherry, from which it 

 is separated by a deep valley. The Druid's chair commands the best 

 prospect of Kotagherry I have yet seen, and it often reminded me 

 of the accounts I had read of the Warden's chair, juror's seats, and 

 table hewn out of the rough moor stone, at Croken Tor at Dart- 

 moor. 



There is not a relic of Druidism existing in England the type of 

 which I have not found on these hills. In the rocky channel of the 

 river I have just spoken of, 



