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bladup
bladup
1986 posts

Re: The finished circle
Aug 05, 2012, 18:53
Sanctuary wrote:
thesweetcheat wrote:
bladup wrote:
thesweetcheat wrote:
We also have an engraving William Borlase made showing the quoit before the capstone collapsed, together with the remains of a surrounding cairn, although obviously we don't know how much more (if any) of the structure was covered by the cairn originally.

Scroll down the page here:

http://www.cornwalls.co.uk/history/sites/zennor_quoit.htm


Wouldn't it be great!!! do you think they are related. I don't think they had that much cairn material [ i'll have to be careful as i can't prove it], i think somewhere like chun wouldn't have had that much more than is there.


Chun's a little bit difficult to judge. There are clear traces of a (circular) mound, but as far as I know we have no way of knowing whether it covered the chamber or not.

Besides which, any stones from the mound could easily have been taken away and swallowed up in the building of the nearby hillfort rampart.


I think a lot depends on the make-up and structure of the dolmen as to how large a possible mound was. If you had a 'window' for instance midway up the structure you would be unlikely to go beyond that and as many were just set onto bedrock where possible with a main earthfast orthostat supporting it all, any cairn surround would be more likely to be in place to stabilise the base structure IMO.


I've always felt it was a lot less than a lot of people think, mulfra doesn't have much left either.
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