Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/383

368 the high road from Truro to Perranporth and, unlike that of St. Just, stands well away from any houses. The circular arena is 130 feet in diameter, surrounded by a bank of earth some ten feet high, nearly perpendicular, and surrounded by a ditch six feet deep on the outside; on the inside sloping inwards, and in a few places showing signs of having been cut into seven or eight tiers of seats. The top is about seven feet wide. There are two openings, nearly north and south, between which runs a cart track. In the arena, about thirty-six feet from the east side, is a circular depression or pit about twelve feet in diameter.

These two amphitheatres show us the skeleton of the Cornish theatre. In their simple construction they are exactly alike, agreeing closely even in size. The surrounding banks and ditches are very much alike in proportions, and in each there is a pit or depression, not in the centre, but yet at some distance from the circumference. It is worth noting that Cornwall contains a very large number of pre-historic circular hill-forts in varying states of preservation—in the Land’s End district, which is full of round-topped hills, there is one to nearly every hill. Each of these forts consists of a circular space enclosed by concentric ramparts and ditches, and generally one can find a pit or depression in a very similar position to those in the amphitheatres. In the case of the forts there is generally water, if not an actual spring, in these pits, so that one associates them with the water supply of the fortress. The use in the case of the theatres was probably, as we shall see presently, very much the contrary. The resemblance is so close that it is not always easy to be quite sure whether a ‘Round,’ where there is no tradition about it, was originally a hill-fort or not, and it is quite possible that forts were sometimes used as theatres, and the pre-historic water-tanks cleared out and used to represent a scriptural locality where water is not the strong point.

There must have been a considerable amount of scenery. It is clear from the Latin stage directions that there was a raised stage (pulpitum), as well as the level of the arena