Page:A book of the west; being an introduction to Devon and Cornwall.djvu/225

Rh Wethers, Scaur Hill, and that on Langstone Moor, never enclosed cairns or kistvaens, and must have had some other purpose. Among semi-barbarous tribes it is customary that the tribe and the clan shall have their places of assembly and consultation, and these are marked round by either stones or posts set up in the ground. Among some of these tribes, if one of the constituent clans fails to send its representative, the stone set up where he should sit is thrown down. It is possible that the circles of upright stones on Dartmoor, not connected with cairns, may have served such a purpose. They are usually placed on the neck of land between two rivers. There are on Dartmoor about a dozen.

V. The stone row is almost invariably associated with cairns and kistvaens, and clearly had some relation to funeral rites. The stone settings are often single, sometimes double, or are as many as eight. They do not always run parallel; they start from a cairn and end with a blocking-stone set across the line. In Scotland they are confined to Caithness. The finest known are at Carnac in Brittany. It is probable that just as a Bedouin now erects a stone near a fakir's tomb as a token of respect, so each of these rude blocks was set up by a member of a tribe, or a household, in honour of the chief buried in the cairn at the head of the row. It is remarkable how greatly the set stones vary in size; some are quite insignificant, and could be planted by a boy, while others require the united efforts of three or four men, with modern appliances of three legs and block to lift and place them. Usually the largest