A HISTORY OF CORNWALL are known ; there is a noticeable specimen on the crest of headland at Kenidjack in St. Just ; but probably many more would be discovered by a systematic search on the moors and hills. They vary very much in size ; from 14 ft. 1 up to 20 are the usual limits; but some are as much as 40, and even 60 ft. in diameter. 2 Some of those on Carn Brea are as small as 8 ft., while others are as much as 20 ft. A thorough examination of those on Carn Brea in Illogan was made by Mr. Thurston C. Peter in 1895. Several of the huts were so constructed that two or more sides were formed of naturally-placed boulders, and most of these had in them hearths or cooking holes or both. These cooking holes were pits sunk into the ground floor of the hut, generally square, but one was triangular. One was lined with stone, a single flat stone on each of three sides, the fourth built up with small stones. The wood ash which came from these cooking holes was of oak, birch, hazel, and alder. All the ' finds ' from these huts are in the Museum of the Royal Institution of Cornwall at Truro, and include a large number of well-made flint arrow-heads, some flint celts and scrapers, spindle whorls, two pieces of ground flint, a bronze ring, and a silver denarius of A.D. 70. Apparently no articles of iron of any sort were found. 8 This fact, although only negative evidence, combined with their evidently superior structure and design would seem to show that the ' hut-clusters ' of Cornwall are of a more recent date than these hut-circles. The hut-clusters, of which perhaps the best preserved is at Chysauster in Gulval, 4 consist of several rooms or huts within one enclosing wall. The walls are faced with stone on the inside and are in some cases still standing 5 or 6 ft. above the floor level of the contained hut or room. The outside of the wall is an earth bank, and the whole is very thick and solid. Two of these enclosures at Chysauster have been examined, and they are both laid out on much the same ground plan. In the course of the exploration of the first Mr. W. C. Borlase found that some of the huts or rooms were roughly paved, and more than one contained a hearth. He found black wheel-made pottery in fragments, stone mullers, millstones, and a piece of insufficiently smelted tin in the condition locally known as ' Jew's house tin.' B The second cluster was excavated by the Penzance Antiquarian Society in 1897. Here, too, was rough paving, and in the centre of one hut a large flat stone lying level on the ground, having in it a circular pit, and in the pit a round stone about 5 inches in diameter. There were also found the upper half of a stone hand-mill in good preservation, large quantities of burnt furze wood, fragments of at least twelve vessels of coarse pottery, several hones, and a lump of the stone from which they were made, two very small pieces of rusty iron, and several rounded pebbles. 6 All these objects are now in the Museum of the Society. Mr. W. C. Borlase records that he had three Roman coins, 'third brasses' of A.D. 265 to 282, which were part of a hoard found at or near the hut-cluster at Bodinnar in Sancreed. 7 After Chysauster the best specimens of these ' hut-clusters ' are to be seen at Bosullow in Madron. Some excavations have been made in these, but not on an extensive scale ; and nothing has been found except 1 Journ. Roy. Inst. Cormv. ix, pt. iii (1888), 349. Vestiges, 19 and plan.
- Maclean, op. cit. i, 24. s Journ. Roy. Inst. Cornio. xiii, pt. i (1895), 93.
4 Edmonds, op. cit. 50 ; Lukis, op. cit, 19 and plan ; Vestiges, 12. 5 Bateman, Vestiges, 15. 6 Tram. Penz. Nat. Hist, and Antiq. Soc. (1893-8), 107. 3 Bateman, op. cit. 5. 370
