Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/521

 Aliscellanea. 479

steep hill sides were sufficient protection elsewhere. Further along the ridge, where the tongue of land begins to join the general plateau, are the remains of camps or dwellings, and there are several barrows. On Black Hill, an elevation south of Trendle Hill, is another Bronze Age camp.

5. In the ploughed fields immediately below Trendle Hill I found many worked flints of the usual neolithic type, including cores, spear-tips, scrapers, and a good but rudely-shaped fabricator.

6. There were curative wells at Came ; one called Pill Well, now dry, and St. Austin's Well, anciently Silver Well. Hel Well still flowing, in a marshy place covered with trees and brushwood, was not curative. A man now living, named Vincent, aged fifty- five years, had a crippled child. Every morning, for several months together, Vincent carried his child, wrapped in a blanket, to St. Austin's Well, and dipped it into the well, and at last it was cured. Sore eyes are healed by bathing them, and feeble health is restored by drinking. A farmer used to go down to this well every morning and drink a tumblerful of the water. [Jonathan Hardy, aged 65, born at Cerne, and now sexton there.] I have not analysed the water, but can affirm that it is not chalybeate. The spring sometimes " breaks," that is, suddenly begins to flow with increased energy. Its water never freezes.

7. There are two persons in Cerne who cure warts: John Tobias, a mason, of Alton Hill, and Mrs. Bowring, by the Union (work- house) Arms Inn. The warts are touched by the stem or stalk of some plant freshly plucked. They are touched separately so as to be counted, and some words are said that are not understood, and then the stem or stalk is buried. — [Jonathan Hardy.]

8. A celebrated water-finder lives here. He uses twigs of hazel or rowan in the usual manner. Everybody believes in his power, and he is sent for from great distances. At Cerne he divined the presence of water close by a cottage door, and on digging there an excellent but buried and forgotten well was discovered.

9. A "toad-doctor" used to live at Pulham, eight miles from Cerne by road. He kept toads. Round the neck of patients suffering from the " King's Evil," beneath their clothing, he would hang a live toad. As long as the toad twitched and moved the cure progressed. — [Robert Childs, aged sixty-nine, formerly sexton. He still attends to the church, but no longer to the grave-yard.]

The doctor's name was Buckland. Every year in May, the time