About 270 stone crosses are to be found in Cornwall. They are mostly of granite and have been fashioned by means of iron implements, in some instances with considerable taste and skill.
They are too well known to require description. To suppose them to have been erected by sun worshippers in the sixth and succeeding centuries is to suppose the prevalence of a religion in Cornwall which at that time prevailed nowhere else in Europe and concerning which history is silent. On the other hand, to suppose them to have been originally connected with nature worship of a peculiarly revolting character and to have been Christianised by signing them with the sign of the cross is highly improbable if, as the maintainers of this hypothesis assert, that sign was regarded as pagan.
A much simpler and more convincing explanation is that the stone crosses were erected in order to disaffect and sanctify places which from time immemorial had been devoted to old pagan superstitions.[33] This at any rate has the merit of being in accordance with the facts disclosed by the Sampson episode. Moreover, it avoids the anachronism which connects them with sun worship, while at the same time it disallows the charge of incredible folly which must otherwise be imputed to the founders of Cornish Christianity if we suppose those earnest men to have retained a degrading symbol of nature worship with little or no modification of its structural features.
A still earlier age, the eolithic, which in Sussex has supplied my school contemporary, Dr. A. Smith Woodward of the British Museum, with what he believes to be a link between man and his pre-human ancestor is not represented in Cornwall.
_Geology of the Land’s End District_, pp. 79-80.
“_Le prétendu caractère phallique de quelques-uns de ces monuments n’est qu’une conjecture chimérique qui a permis à certains esprits imaginatifs de se donner carrière._” Déchelette, _Manuel d’Archéologie_, I, 431, n. 2.
“Wishing to put beyond dispute the origin and purpose of some few at least of these monoliths, and to ascertain if any were indeed sepulchral, the author ... examined the ground round some half-dozen of them.”
At the foot of a menhir at Pridden, St. Buryan, he found “a deposit of splinters of human bone.” At the foot of a menhir at Trelew, St. Buryan, he found “a deposit of splintered bones similar in quantity and appearance to that found at Pridden.” A precisely similar discovery was made at Trenuggo, Sancreed. Another at Tregonebris.