Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/78

52 hut circles, and the remains of walls for the protection of the hill; but, when Mr. Thurstan Peter undertook the excavation of the circles in 1895, it was his young daughter who induced him to extend his researches to the spaces between the naturally placed boulders near the circles, with the result that some of them also were found to have been roofed in and used as dwellings. The circular huts appear to have been of the same type as those at Grimspound, but larger, the diameter of one being as much as twenty-six feet; some of them had hearths and cooking holes like those on Dartmoor, but there were no raised platforms. A few broken spindle whorls, some fragments of pottery of a better kind than that found on Dartmoor, some stone mullers and rubbers, a polished celt, some flint spearheads, knives, flakes, and cores, and about five hundred flint arrowheads of all shapes,—thirty of them in faultless condition and of most beautiful workmanship,—were the reward of the exploration of nearly one hundred hut-circles and inter-boulder dwellings.

The fact that so many arrowheads and several spearheads have been found at Carnbrê, while none have been found at Grimspound, and not many on Dartmoor at all, has been held to indicate that the Cornishmen were a warlike people, either from choice or necessity, while those of Dartmoor were more peaceful and pastoral; and it has also been pointed out that Grimspound is commanded from higher ground on three sides, and is rather a protected village or cattle station than a fortress like Carnbrê. Seeing, however, that arrows are useful for hunting as well as for fighting, it may be questioned whether this difference (should it be sustained by future explorations) may not be due to racial or tribal peculiarities, or may not rather show that Grimspound belongs to a somewhat earlier period than Carnbrê; and this view may be supported by a reference to the great quantity of "stone rows" on Dartmoor, the like of which cannot be found in Cornwall or anywhere else. The existence of flint weapons in Cornwall opens up an interesting question, for there is little, if any, flint in the county suitable for them. In the wildest part of it, between the Cheesewring and Brown Willy, is a piece of water, called Dozmarè Pool, from the peat on the banks of which great numbers of beautiful flakes have been obtained, but the