A Book of the West/Volume 2/4
CHAPTER IV.
CORNISH CASTLES
ANYONE with a very little experience can at once "spot" a camp or castle by the appearance from a distance of a hill or headland; and the traveller in Devon and Cornwall will pass scores of them, as he will see by his Ordnance Survey Map, without giving much attention to them, without supposing that they can be of great interest, unless his attention has been previously directed to the subject. It is a pity that anyone should go through a country which may really be said to make ancient camps and castles its speciality and not know something about them.
Of hill castles or camps there are several kinds:—
I. Those that are rectangular or approximately so, and which have been attributed to the Romans. Of these in Cornwall there are but few. Tregear, near Bodmin, and Bossens, in S. Erth, have yielded Roman coins and relics of pottery; but whether actually
Roman or Romano-British remains undecided. 
LAUNCESTON
2. There are those which consist of a tump or mound, sometimes wholly artificial, usually natural, and adapted by art, and in connection with this is a bass-court, usually, but not universally, quadrilateral. This was the Saxon type of burh; it was also that of the Merovingian. The classic passage descriptive of these is in the Life of S. John of Terouanne, written in the eleventh century:—
"It was customary for the rich men and nobles of these parts, because their main occupation is the carrying on of feuds, to heap up a mound of earth as high as they are able to raise it, and to dig round it a broad, open, and deep ditch, and to girdle the whole upper edge of the bank with a barrier of wooden planks, stoutly fastened together, and set round with numerous turrets, and this in place of a wall.
"Within was constructed a house, or rather a citadel, commanding the whole area, so that the gate of it could alone be reached by means of a bridge that sprang from the counterside of the ditch, and was gradually raised as it advanced, supported by sets of piers, two, or even three, trussed on each side, over convenient spans, crossing the moat with a managed ascent, so as to attain the upper level of the mound, landing on its edge level with the threshold of the door."
A very good idea of such a camp may be derived from the representation of the fortifications of Dnan on the Bayeux tapestry.
In France the mottes on which the wooden dongeons of the Merovingian chiefs were planted certainly abound; but in many cases the bank enclosing the bass-court has disappeared. Good examples may be seen at Plympton, at Lydford, and at Launceston. At the former and latter Norman walls took the place of the palisading; but at Lydford a keep was erected on the tump, but the line of earthworks was never walled. In Ireland and in Scotland such camps abound; they are there due to Saxon and Danish invaders. In Ireland they are called motes, in England burhs. They afforded the type on which the Normans constructed their castles.
3. A much more common form of camp in Devon and Cornwall is one that is circular or oval, and consists of concentric rings of earth, or earth and stone mixed, with ditches between.
There is, however, a variant where a headland is fortified, either one standing above the sea into which it juts, or at the junction of two streams. There it sufficed to run defensive banks and ditches across the neck of the promontory.
This description of camp or castle is usually supposed to be Celtic.
In Ireland such a camp is a rath. The same word is employed for similar camps in a portion of Pembrokeshire.
Every noble had a right to have a rath, and every chief had his lis or dun.
A lis was an enclosed space, with an earth-mound surrounding it, and was the place in which justice was administered. Lis enters into many place-names in Cornwall, as Liskeard, Lesnewth, Listewdrig, the court of that king who killed S. Gwynear and bullied S. Ewny and the other Irish settlers ; Lescaddock, Lescawn, Lestormel, now corrupted into Restormel. In Ireland les had a wider meaning. S. Carthagh was throwing up a mound around a plot of land where he was going to plant a monastery.
"What are you about there?" asked an inquisitive woman.
"Only engaged in the construction of a little lis," was the reply.
"Lis beg!" (small lis), exclaimed the woman. "I call it a lis mor” (a big lis). And Lismore is its name to this day.
In Ireland every king had his dun. This was an enlarged rath with an outer court in which he held his hostages, for the law required this: "He is no king who has not hostages in lock-up."
Dun in Welsh is din, and dinas is but another form of the same word, and signifies a royal residence.
A gloss to an old Irish law tract says that a royal dun must have two walls and a moat for water. Dun in Scotland is applied to any fort. According to the Gaelic dictionaries, it is "a heap or mound,” and even a dung-hill is a dun.
In fact, the French dune and the Cornish towan derive from the same root. Dun so much resembles the Anglo-Saxon tun that we cannot always be sure of the derivation of a place-name that ends in tun.
Every tribe had its dun, to which the cattle were driven, and where the women and children were placed in security in times of danger. This would be in addition to the royal residence, that is the dun of the rig.
Within the dun were numerous structures of timber, roofed with oak shingles, some of a large description, such as a banqueting hall; but the habitations of the garrison were circular, of wicker-work, and thatched with rushes.
In Cornwall there is Dingerrein, the dinas of S. Geraint; Castel-an-Dinas; Damelioc (Din-Maeloc); Dunheved, the old name for Launceston; Dundagel.
4. I come now to the stone fortresses that are found in parts of Cornwall and Wales. They are also to be seen in Scotland and Ireland. These are called caerau in Wales. A cathair is the term applied to them in Ireland, and cathair signifies as well a city.
They are found in England only in Somersetshire, Devon, and Cornwall; and in Wales only in such parts as were invaded and occupied from Ireland.
In Kerry and the isles of Arran are those in best preservation, and from these we can see that the walls were regularly built up with double faces, rubble being between them. Very usually in Arran stones are placed with the end outwards, so that they serve as ties to hold the walls together.
The Welsh examples are very perfect, and precisely similar to those in Ireland.
We know that the Gauls built stone camps—Cæsar calls them their oppida—but they employed beams of timber along with the stone to tie the walls together. The wood has everywhere rotted away, and the enclosing walls of the Gaulish camps now present the same appearance precisely as do the similar stone camps in Devon, Somerset, and Cornwall. When the timber decayed the stones fell into heaps. In Arran and Anglesey there was no timber; conse quently stones were employed as ties, and there the walls remain comparatively intact.
Within the caer were circular stone beehive huts; also chambers that were circular were contrived in the thickness of the walls. These "sentry boxes" have been noticed in Wales, and also in Cornwall and Devon.
The account of Castel-an-Dinas, before it was robbed for the erection of a tower, is precisely such as might be given of one of those in Ireland or Wales:—
"It consisted of two stone walls, one within the other, in a circular form, surrounding the area of the hill. The ruins are now fallen on each side of the walls, and show the work to have been of great height and thickness. There was also a third or outer wall built more than half-way round. Within these walls are many little enclosures of a circular form, about seven yards in diameter, with little walls round them of two or three feet high; they appear to have been so many huts for the shelter of the garrison."
In fact, this was a royal dinas. Not only had it the requisite double wall, but also the drecht gialnai, or dyke of the hostages. Every king retained about him pledges from the under-chiefs that they would be faithful.
There are several of these stone camps in Devon and Cornwall. In Somersetshire Whorlebury is very interesting; in Devon are Whit Tor and Cranbrook; in Cornwall the Cheesewring camp, Carn Brea, Chun Castle, the camp of Caer Conan on Tregenning Hill, Helborough, beside Castel-an-Dinas in Ludgvan. The heroic legends of Ireland attribute these stone camps to the Firbolgs, the non-Aryan dusky race that was in possession previous to the arrival of the Celts. But that the Milesians learned from them the art of constructing such castles is very certain, for in Christian times the monks imitated them in some of their settlements.
Lord Dunraven, who has photographed these stone duns, says:—
"The legends of the early builders are preserved in the compilations of Irish scribes and bardic writers dating from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. The story, which is said by these writers to have been handed down orally during the earliest centuries of the Christian era, and committed to writing when that art first became known in Ireland, is the history of the wanderings and final destruction of a hunted and persecuted race, whose fate would seem to have been mournful and strange as the ruined fortresses of the lost tribe which now stand before us. Coming to Ireland through Britain, they seem to have been long beaten hither and thither, till, flying still westward, they were protected by Ailill and Maeve, who are said to have reigned in Connaught about the first century of the Christian era. From these monarchs they obtained a grant of lands along the western coast of Galway, as well as the islands of Arran, where they remained till their final expulsion. Thus their forms seem to pass across the deep abyss of time, like the white flakes of foam that are seen drifted by the hurrying wind over the wild and wasted ruins of their fortresses."
Excavations show that these stone caers are more ancient than the Christian era; they belong to the period of flint weapons and the introduction of bronze. But, as already stated, the conquerors of the rude stone monument builders adopted some of their arts, and some of their camps are much later.
5. The stone, castle, the walls set in mortar, is not earlier in Devon and Cornwall than the Norman Conquest. There are no really stately castles in either county, with the exception of Launceston. Rougemont, Exeter, is eminently unpicturesque; Tiverton, Totnes, Plympton, are almost complete ruins; Lydford—well, as Browne the poet wrote of it in the reign of James I.:—
"They have a castle on a hill;
I took it for an old windmill,
The vanes blown off by weather;
To lie therein one night, 't is guessed
'T were better to be stoned or pressed
Or hanged ere you come hither."
And ruin that has fallen on it has not improved its appearance.
Okehampton is but a mean relic; Restormel is circular; Trematon is like a pork-pie; Pendennis, S. Mawes, late and insignificant. Tintagel owes everything to its superb situation and to the legend that it was the place where King Arthur was born. The most picturesque of all is Pregersick, near Breage, but that is late. Its story shall be told in the chapter on Penzance.