HALSETOWN— HARLYN BAY interest, as being connected with the boyhood of Sir Henry Irving. In his fourth year he was left here in charge of Mrs. Penberthy, his Cornish aunt, and he lived at Halsetown till he was eleven. To quote his own words : " I recall Halsetown as a village nestling between sloping hills, bare and desolate, disfigured by great heaps of slack from the mines, and with the Knill Monument standing prominent as a landmark to the east. It was a wild and weird place, fascinating in its own peculiar beauty, and taking a more definite shape in my youthful imagination by reason of the fancies and legends of the people." Sir Henry believes that this place had a real influence in shaping his mind. Hnniwn is a valley of the Bodmin Moors, much devastated in 1 847 by a flood of the river Camel. Hanter-Gantick, sometimes known as the Cornish Valley of Rocks, is situated on the same moors. Formerly noted for its wild and romantic loneliness, it has more lately become a great quarry of granite. Harlyn Bay {z m. W. of Padstow) has become famous for the neolithic cemetery lately discovered during excavation for a well. Some forty or fifty slate kists were exhumed, with skeletons and bones in plenty, but no pottery. There were some tiny kists for children, but many of the bodies had been buried without coffins. This district had already afforded similar discoveries, but nothing on such a large scale as this. The burials were in three layers, 125
