Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/382

Rh appeal to ‘our kind friends in front’ which once formed, and for all I know still forms part of the conventional ritual of a modern farce.

The two complete amphitheatres are those of St. Just-in-Penwith and Perran.

The St. Just amphitheatre is situated in the middle of a small market town about six miles north of the Land’s End. It is called indiscriminately the ‘Amphitheatre,’ the ‘Round’ or the ‘Plan-an-Gwary.’ It is a circle 126 feet in diameter, and is surrounded by a bank about seven feet high faced with stone on the outside. There was once a ditch round the exterior, which raised the outer height to ten feet, but houses now come up to it in some places and roads in others, and the ditch is not much in evidence. The bank slopes inwards and in Borlase’s time (1750) had six rows of seats fourteen inches wide and a foot in height, with a width of about seven feet at the top of the bank. There are now no signs of seats, but only a grassy slope. The arena is now concreted, and in one place, not in the middle, there is a sort of pit or depression. There are two openings, on opposite sides of the circle. The place was used until quite recent times for wrestling matches on Easter and Whit Mondays, but since such amusements have given way to Wesleyan preachings and prayer-meetings it has not been much used at all.

The Perran Round is near a hamlet called Rose in the parish of Perran Zabuloe, about half a mile from the Goonhavem halte, on the Chacewater and Newquay light railway, and about six miles from Newquay. It stands on the highest point of a not very steep hill and commands a very fine view, extending over most of middle Cornwall, from the western hills beyond Carn Brea and St. Agnes Beacon to perhaps even Roughtor and Brown Willy on the east, though on the day when I recently visited it, it was too dull in that direction to be certain. About a mile and a half away, among the ‘towans’ or sand-dunes by the Atlantic, is the celebrated ‘Lost Church’ of St. Piran. The Round is by the side of