Cabinet of Curiosities - Day 8

Today we have some of my collection of Hagstones.

I wrote about these back in July when talking about Cornwall's famous holed stone - the Mên-an-Tol (see here).

I've probably visited the holed stone a hundred times or more. When I was growing up in Penzance, the strangely-named Ding Dong Moor was a favourite family walk, taking in Ding Dong Mine, Lanyon Quoit (a dolmen), the Men Scryfa (an inscribed standing stone), Boskednan Stone Circle and the Mên-an-Tol. And it led to a lifelong fascination with ancient sites of significance and with holed stones.

I've collected holed stones, also known as witch stones or hagstones, all my life. They are strangely pleasing aren't they? Certainly, they were once popular talismans that were hung over a door for luck - much as people do with horseshoes. Some said that looking through the hole might allow you to see into other mystical worlds. Perhaps that's the origin of the larger stones like the Mên-an-Tol - an attempt to magnify this power? In Cornwall these stones are called milpreves, or adder stones, due to a belief that they were made by snakes. In Robert Hunt's Popular Romances of the West of England (1865) he wrote: 

'The country people around the Land's End say that in old times no one could live in the low grounds, which were then covered with thickets, and these swarming with adders. Even at a much later period, in the summer-time, it was not safe to venture amongst the furze on the Downs without a milpreve. (I have never seen a milpreve; but it is described to me as being about the size of a pigeon's egg, and I am told that it is made by the adders when they get together in great numbers. Is it not pro­bable that the milpreve may be one of the madrepore corals-- millepore-- found sometimes on the beaches around Land's End?) A friend writes me, " I was once shown a milpreve; it was nothing more than a beautiful ball of coralline lime-stone, the section of the coral being thought to be entangled young snakes."' 

I can't resist picking one up and keeping it if I find one. The great sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth did the same and it's easy to see how these natural shapes might have inspired her work (see here). 

This little selection comes mostly from South Wales and Cornwall though the two big flints were kicked up by the plough in the farm fields near where I live on the Chiltern Hills.