For this reason another strange phenomenon of Lundy, about which the imagination of an earlier people must have lingered, passes barely remarked. There is a great promontory on the coast, opposite the reef called the Hen and Chickens, which is pierced by a sort of tunnel about eight hundred feet in length and sixty feet in height, through which a boat can sail on calm days at high-water; and in the centre of the tunnel, bubbling up through the sea, rises a perpetual spring of fresh water. This is called the Virgin's Well, and I can discover no story or legend with which it is connected, though the name may possibly contain some earlier myth, not based upon Christian worship.
[Illustration: Lynton: The Devil's Cheesering]
The names of other remarkable features of the island, the great rocks which are piled along its coasts, are all descriptive and not legendary names--the Devil's Chimney, the Cheeses, the Templar's Rock, the Gannett Rock, the Mousehole. These names will have been given in comparatively recent times, at least since the Saxon invasion, for they show a different mentality from the Celtic names which are found widely in Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and Northumberland, and which have a poetic and imaginative quality. Such is the difference between Heddon's Mouth, "the Giant's Mouth," or Dunster, "the Tower on the Hill," and such names as I have quoted above. The very name of Lundy itself, which is "Lund-ei," the island of Lund, as Caldy is "Cald-ei," the island of Cald, show a Teutonic origin, perhaps Scandinavian, but not named so by the Celts of Britain or Ireland.
But "there were great men before Agamemnon"; certainly there were great men on this island before the adventurer Lund landed upon it and gave it his name.
In 1850, in digging foundations near a farmhouse in the southern part of the island, a great grave, or series of graves, was discovered. There were two stone coffins, made of hewn blocks of granite, just deep enough to contain a body, and with the covers sloped and cut each from a single block. One was ten feet in length, and contained the huge skeleton of a man, over eight feet high; the other was eight feet long, and contained a skeleton well over six feet, which "was imagined to be that of a woman," but on what grounds I cannot discover, as it does not seem to have been carefully examined, and is therefore probably mere conjecture, based upon its juxtaposition to the larger coffin. In the account of the excavation a "macabre" incident is recorded. One of the workmen, seizing the shin-bone of the giant, placed it against his own leg, and found that it reached halfway up his thigh; whereupon, taking up the lower jawbone, he fitted it easily over his own lower jaw, though he was a burly man and bearded.