Page:A Book of the West (vol. 2).djvu/171

Rh The whole of the Cornish moors, like Dartmoor, are strewn with prehistoric villages and towns of circular houses, sometimes within rings of rude walling that served as a protection to the settlement, and connected with enclosures for the cattle against wolves. But though in many cases the doorways remain, of upright jambs with a rude lintel of granite thrown across, complete examples roofed in are rare, and those to which we direct attention now are known to very few persons indeed. The huts in question measure internally from six to eight feet in diameter ; the walls are composed of moorstones rudely laid in courses, without having been touched by any tool or bedded in mortar. The walls are some two to three feet thick. Sometimes they are formed of two concentric rings of stones set upright in the ground, filled in between with smaller stones, but such huts were never stone-roofed. Beehive-roofed they were, but with their dome formed of oak boughs brought together in the centre, the ends resting on these walls, and the whole thatched with straw or heather or fern. But the stone-built and roofed huts have walls of granite blocks laid in courses, and after five feet they are brought to dome over by the overlapping of the coverers, in the primitive fashion that preceded the invention of the arch.

The roof was thus gathered in about a smoke-hole, which was itself finally closed with a wide, thin granite slab, and thus the whole roof and sides were buried in turf, so that the structure resembled a huge ant-hill. Most of this encasing flesh and skin has