A HISTORY OF CORNWALL The next writer who dealt with this subject, the Rev. R. Polwhele, 1 agrees with Dr. Borlase in calling the entrenchments Roman, and goes further. He was apparently acquainted with a larger number of them, and he writes confidently ' almost all of our camps are Roman.' On the other hand he entirely refuses to accept a Danish origin for the hill and the cliff castles which he puts together (including amongst them, quite unaccountably, Carnabargus in St. Erth) and calls them Irish. Since these two writers little has been done towards a systematic investigation of these camps and earthworks until recent years. In 1881 Mr. T. Cornish wrote a paper 2 in which, beginning at Hayle, and being guided largely by the syllable car, gar or gear as meaning ' camp ' in the place names, he built up a suggestion of military operations extending from Phillack to Helston, in which the Cornish folk defended themselves against a Saxon invasion from the estuary on the north coast ; and sug- gested here the identification of the three battles in which, according to the Chroniclers, 3 the Cornish with the help of Ivor, king of Brittany, recovered their land from the Saxon in the year 755 A.D. In 1890 the Rev. W. lago, 4 starting with the objects of Roman origin found at the ' Tregear ' camp at Nanstallon in Bodmin, and guided largely by the distinction between square camps and round, constructed a Roman invasion from Port Isaac opposed by the Cornish. Yet another explanation, and perhaps the most fruitful of all, has been put forward quite recently. In 1871 Mr. Pattison ' expressed an opinion that Upton Castle in Lewannick was made to protect ' the possessions of a group of villagers in their huts.' But it is to Mr. O. B. Peter 6 that we owe the broad idea that all these entrenchments are fortified villages, appropriate to a time when men needed rather to protect their herds and property, especially at night, from a surrounding of lawlessness and disorder than from any actual military operations. In addition to the features of these ' village entrenchments ' described by Mr- Peter, it may well be noted that the greatest number of them are found in the districts on the north and the east side of the Bodmin moors. In these same parts, and especially between the moors and the Tamar, Saxon and Cornish place names are freely intermixed, and many of the Saxon names end in ' stow ' or ' stock.' Our chroniclers relate 1 that although the Cor- nish were driven out of Devonshire about the year 735 A.D. the warfare did not end until Athelstan fixed the Tamar as the boundary between the two races in 936. These entrenchments, 'stockades,' are imprints which two centuries of border warfare might well leave on the face of the country. There is also a large number near together in the parishes north of Truro, in Newlyn, St. Allen, Perranzabuloe and St. Enoder; and here 1 Hiitory of Cornwall (1803), pt. i. ch. iv. p. 73. 2 Trans. Penz. Nat. Hist, y Antiq. Soc. vol. i. (new ser.) (1882), p. 126. 3 Borlase, Antiquities, 410. 4 Journ. Roy. Inst. Cornvi. (1890), vol. x. p. 229. 5 Journ. Roy. Inst. Corntv. (1871), vol. ir. p. 73. 6 Ibid. (1902), vol. rv. p. 107. Borlase, Antiquities, 410. 456
