Boscawen-Un

Boscawen-Un is a prehistoric stone circle in west Cornwall, in the parish of St Buryan, Lamorna and Paul. It stands on a low ridge above the upper Lamorna River, on a gentle south-facing slope north of the village of St Buryan. Nineteen upright stones form an oval ring. A taller stone leans just south of the middle.

One stone of the ring is quartz and the others are granite. A wide gap opens on the west. Two further stones lie partly buried on the north-east edge of the ring, and two outlying standing stones stand in the ground farther to the north-east. This is not the Merry Maidens, the late Neolithic circle also called Dawns Men about two miles south of St Buryan, and it is not Boskednan or the Tregeseal circles.

The tithe map of 1840 used the name Dawns Men for Boscawen-Un as well, which is why the places are easy to confuse.

The ring is given as 24.9 metres long by 21.9 metres wide. A measured survey of 1999 found a longest internal diameter of 25 metres, on an axis 122.5 degrees from north, and a shortest of 21.9 metres, and called this the least circular of the larger circles in Cornwall, with only the tiny ring at Duloe more irregular. People who walked it that summer still took it for a good circle. Published grid references differ by a small step, SW412273 and SW412274.

The scheduled point of the ring is SW 41221 27359.

The name belongs to the later farm, not to a name recorded from the time the stones were raised. One reading takes Cornish bos, from an older word bod, as a farm, dwelling, or settlement, scawen as an elder tree, and un as one or single, so the whole means the single farm by the elder trees, or the dwelling by the elder trees. Early spellings vary, and that reading leaves the grammar of the last element uncertain. Craig Weatherhill set that reading down in his dictionary of Cornish place-names.

Another reading, used in the archaeological study of the downland, takes bod as a settlement name of a kind mainly given between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, scawen as elder, and the last element as gun, downland or moorland, later heard as noon. On that reading any original elders belong at Boscawen-Ros, on the coast toward Lamorna, and Boscawen-Un is the down. A shorter account gives the sense as elder tree on the downs. The circle is pronounced in the local way as something like Bosca-noon.

No object from inside the ring dates it. A trench cut across the circle in the autumn of 1864 found nothing. Large regular stone circles, where they have been excavated elsewhere, fall between the Late Neolithic and the Middle Bronze Age, about 2400 to 1000 BC, and only a small number of the stone circles known in England are of this large regular kind. A stewardship account of this circle dates it to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, about 2500 to 1500 BC.

Peter Herring's study places the ring in the later Neolithic or early Bronze Age, a few hundred years either side of 2000 BC, and repeats the wider judgement that stone circles are among the most poorly dated of common prehistoric monuments. The same study treats the leaning central stone as older than the ring.

In the British Isles the Neolithic runs from about 4100 to about 2500 BC. Around 4000 BC, farming spread with new arrivals, polished stone tools came into use, and the first great monuments were chambered tombs. Later in the Neolithic, communities began to build stone circles, and that habit continued into the Bronze Age. The language of those early farmers is not known.

The Bronze Age in Britain runs from about 2500 or 2200 BC until about 800 BC. Its opening is tied to the Bell Beaker culture and to a large change in ancestry across Britain between about 2400 and 2000 BC. South-western Britain became a major source of tin, and tin-bronze was fully in use in Britain around 2200 to 2100 BC. Ceremonial monuments went on being built and altered.

None of that ancestry or tin was recovered from this circle. It is the setting of the centuries in which the ring is usually placed. Cornwall was not yet the kingdom of Dumnonia. Dumnonia was a Brythonic kingdom of the sixth and seventh centuries in the south-west, heir to the territory of the Dumnonii, centred on what is now Devon and also taking in Cornwall and part of Somerset, and pressed westward over time by the West Saxon kingdom.

A later triad that names a bardic court in Dumnonia belongs to that medieval world, not to the raising of the stones.

William Borlase, in 1754, put the circle first, the central pillar second, and a small structure he called a cromleh third. Peter Herring reverses that order. He puts the leaning stone first, the cromleh second, and the oval ring third, and the two cairns after the ring. The early date he offers for the pillar rests on the shape of the carvings, read as ground or polished stone axe-heads of an early Neolithic kind, of the fourth millennium or the earlier third.

He allows that the cromleh may have been added more than a thousand years later, in the late third or early second millennium, if it is a cist, and that the ring may belong to the early Bronze Age. There is no agreed sequence. The trench found nothing to date, and standing stones and cists can share the same centuries.

The central stone is the largest in the complex. It stands about two metres south-west of the rough centre of the oval. It leans toward the east-north-east, toward the middle of the ring and toward the cromleh, at about 42 degrees from the vertical. Borlase drew the lean nearer 60 degrees.

One account gives the stone as 2.7 metres long, with the tip only 2.0 metres above the ground because of the slant. Another says that if it stood upright it would be 2.4 metres tall. A third calls it 2.5 metres high. The stewardship account also says 2.4 metres, and adds that it is not known whether the stone always leaned or slipped later.

The north-east face, the broadest, was drawn in 1999 as 2.18 metres high and 1.08 metres wide. The stone tapers like a polished axe, with the blade end in the ground and the point in the air, as if it had been caught chopping into the earth. Similar axe-shaped menhirs are known in Brittany, above all the great broken menhir of the Morbihan. A tall stone in the churchyard at Rudston in east Yorkshire has been compared in the same way.

William Camden wrote the first description. He said that nineteen stones stood in a circle, about twelve feet apart, with one much larger stone inside them. He did not mention a lean. The passage has been dated to 1582, to 1586, and to about 1589, and the place-name in it appears as Biscaw Woune, Biscawe Woune, and Biscowoon.

He is said to have given the circle either to the later Roman period or to the time of Athelstan, and he may never have seen the stones himself. William Stukeley was there in 1749. He thought someone searching for treasure had disturbed the pillar and made it lean, and he called the stone the Kibla, using a word for the direction of prayer to mean the focus of veneration. Stukeley, who lived from 1687 to 1765, had argued that the druids of Britain kept a patriarchal Christianity inherited from the biblical patriarchs, and that they had raised stone circles as serpentine monuments of the Trinity.

That was the frame he brought to this pillar. In 1876, at a congress on the site, William Copeland Borlase said the diggers had gone down beside the pillar and found it carefully set in its leaning position. A small rounded stone jammed against the angle on the north-east side may be a prop. Cotton drew something like it in 1827.

The 1885 description did not.

On the lower northern part of the north-east face are two shapes side by side in low relief. Ian McNeil Cooke first recorded them in 1986 and read them as Neolithic stone axes. They are parallel and at the same height, about 40 millimetres apart at the top, with their bases about 200 millimetres above the ground. The northern shape is 390 millimetres long, 190 millimetres across the blade, and 90 millimetres across the rounded butt.

The southern shape is 400, 200, and 90 millimetres. The ratios of length to width, 2.05 and 2.0, sit close to the ratio of the visible face of the stone itself, about 2.01. Herring reads them as ground or polished axes rather than flaked ones, like early axes from Carn Brea, and he writes that if they are prehistoric they are the only carvings of ground or polished stone axe-heads known in Britain. Axes cut on sarsens at Stonehenge, carvings at Ri Cruin and at Nether Largie in Kilmartin, and a slab from a barrow at Badbury in Dorset, show metal axe-heads, most probably bronze flanged axes, and they are incised rather than left in relief.

The scheduled account of this stone speaks of a crude incised carving thought to represent an axe head, which is a different description from two shapes left standing by pecking the granite around them. The county record calls them two Neolithic axe-shapes in positive relief, and the only known example of that kind of carving in the county. A wider public line has called them the only stone axe carvings in Britain, which goes beyond that distinction.

In early July 2015 Thomas Goskar, brought to the stone by Adrian Rodda, recorded the face by photogrammetry. He read the pair not as axes but as feet, soles outward, with a row of toes clearest on the right-hand foot, and he put their length at about 450 millimetres. He compared them with feet on a stone of the Dolmen du Petit-Mont at Arzon in Brittany, about 230 millimetres long. Barbara Bender had noted in 1986 that the Breton stone was already gone, presumed lost or destroyed in the war of 1939 to 1945.

Goskar found it photographed in a 1927 corpus of the engraved stones of the Morbihan. About 500 millimetres above the feet, his model showed two circular marks in low relief, like carvings read as breasts in Breton gallery graves such as those at Tressé and Prajou-Menhir. He suggested that the circle might, for reasons unknown, have been built with stone taken from a larger chambered tomb of Breton type, and he noted that many inner faces at Boscawen-Un are flat, as if they had once lined a passage or a chamber. Reuse of decorated standing stones is known in Brittany.

Herring's paper, which added Goskar's report as it went to press, answered that the Breton feet show the rake of toes, and a shorter little toe, while the shapes at Boscawen-Un have wider ends that are rounded but more or less square. Other carvings of feet in Britain, at the Calderstones near Liverpool and on a few cists in Somerset, Northumberland, and Angus, do not look like these. If the circular marks are confirmed, Herring wrote, the Breton parallel would be stronger. Both readings are still in print, and the county record still describes axes.

Cooke said the carvings are clearest when the midsummer sun has just risen. One account says they are fully lit only around the summer solstice sunrise, with a partial light around the summer sunset, and that the ring is aligned on the winter solstice sunrise as seen from the Lamorna Gap. Another says the pillar faces the midsummer sunrise toward an outlying standing stone, and that from the far side of the ring the sun at Samhain, the last day of October, sets between the pillar and the quartz. The position of the quartz, when it is placed in the south-west, has also been tied to the sun moving south after All Souls.

Herring treats the midsummer light as meaningful only if the carvings belong to the original stone, and he says the oval is too irregular for a true centre from which alignments could have been fixed. No true circle, oval, or ellipse passes through all the stones that were not put back in the nineteenth century. Some accounts read the pillar as a masculine sign and the quartz block as a feminine one. That is an interpretation, not a find from the ground.

A count of nineteen stones has been linked to the 18.64-year cycle of the moon, or to the nineteen-year cycle of moon and sun. Herring thinks the number may not have been a careful choice, though the surviving circles of West Penwith fall in a fairly tight band, between eighteen and twenty-three stones. Quartz was clearly special to some megalithic builders: when one of the Hurlers circles on Bodmin Moor was excavated, a layer of quartz was found in its foundation. That is another monument, not this one.

The stones of the ring vary. The scheduled heights run from 0.9 to 1.3 metres. The stewardship account says 0.9 to 1.4 metres. The 1999 table runs from 0.9 metres, on stone 3, to 1.35 metres, on stone 19, with fourteen of the nineteen between 1.0 and 1.2 metres.

Above-ground volumes run from 0.15 cubic metres, stone 17, to 1.09 cubic metres, stone 19. A quarter to a third of each stone is thought to stand below the turf. At about 2.65 tons to the cubic metre, four stones weigh two tons or more and another nine weigh about a ton. The gaps between the nearest parts of the bases run from 2.1 metres, between stones 7 and 8, to 3.75 metres, between stones 10 and 11.

Stones stand closer together in the north-western half, except for a gap of 5.9 metres between stones 19 and 1. That gap has been called an entrance, like the gap at the Merry Maidens, though it lies on the opposite side of the ring. Herring reads it as the place of a lost stone about 0.8 metres wide, which would have left ordinary gaps of about 2.55 metres, so that the ring may once have held twenty stones. Camden's twelve feet between stones matches some of the wider measured gaps and not the narrow ones.

Numbering clockwise from the north-west gap, the 1999 record gives each stone a height, a width, and a thickness in metres. Stone 1 is 1.2 by 0.9 by 0.4, flat-topped, leaning inward about 8 degrees. Stone 2 is 1.05 by 0.9 by 0.4, with a gently pointed top. Stone 3 is 0.9 by 1.1 by 0.4, irregular, perhaps broken on the top and the east side in antiquity.

Stone 4 is 1.05 by 0.9 by 0.4 and leans outward about 5 degrees. Stone 5 is 1.15 by 0.9 by 0.25, irregular, leaning outward about 5 degrees, and is one of the three put back in the 1860s. Stone 6 is 1.05 by 0.6 by 0.4, with a rounded top. Stones 7 and 8 are the only pair with angled tops.

Stone 7 is 1.05 by 0.9 by 0.25 and has lost its top. Stone 8 is 1.0 by 1.0 by 0.35 and leans inward about 4 degrees. Their high sides stand next to each other, beside the cromleh, and their long axes sit a little off the line of the ring, making a small indentation whose visual centre lies outside the circle to the north-east. Stone 9 is 1.3 by 0.8 by 0.85, flat-topped, probably reset in the 1860s, with a flake missing.

Stone 10 is 1.15 by 0.5 by 0.6. Stone 11 is 1.1 by 0.7 by 0.3 and leans inward about 4 degrees. Stones 10 and 11 may have been reset before Borlase's day, because their flattest faces do not look inward as the others do. Stone 12 is 1.3 by 0.8 by 0.4, irregular, shown fallen by Borlase in 1754, and probably reset in the 1860s.

Stone 13 is 1.05 by 0.85 by 0.45 and leans inward about 5 degrees. Stone 14 is 1.2 by 0.8 by 0.25, with a top that may be broken. Stone 15 is 1.1 by 0.85 by 0.4 and leans inward about 5 degrees. Stone 16 is 1.0 by 1.0 by 0.45.

Stone 17 is 1.0 by 0.75 by 0.2, the smallest in volume. Stone 18, the quartz, is 1.25 by 1.05 by 0.8, with crystals in its cavities, leaning inward about 2 degrees. Stone 19 is 1.35 by 1.15 by 0.7, the largest of the ring, leaning inward about 5 degrees, and it may have lost a flake at the top. Stones 5, 9, and 12 may now stand about 0.2 metres too high, and 9 and 12 a little outside the old line.

Stone 5 stands too close to stone 6. The quartz has been placed by other accounts on the western side, and by the stewardship account on the north-east side. Herring's stone 18 is in the south-west, beside stone 19. A repeated modern mistake, including in Aubrey Burl's book of 1976 on the stone circles of Britain, makes the central stone the quartz.

The quartz is a stone of the ring. That book also described the circle as besieged by gorse. Aubrey Burl, who lived from 1926 to 2020, treated circles and henges as places of ritual connected with death, fertility, and ancestors, used at points of the year such as the spring equinox and the summer solstice, and he was wary of the stronger claims that such rings were observatories for a class of astronomer priests.

Three prone stones just outside the ring, and a fourth about 1.4 metres away inside it, may be a single feature. Borlase called it a cromleh and thought it later than the pillar, or the pillar would have been set in the true centre. The largest outer stone is about 1.2 metres across and only 0.15 metres thick on the west, and it may be a capstone, either still in place or shifted. A smaller stone lies to its north.

The stone to the south comes out of a low earthy mound about 2 metres across and 0.3 metres high. They do not sit neatly in a known type of monument. A cist in a small mound is the most likely reading. They were recorded before 1752, and the main improvement of these crofts came after 1800, so they are unlikely to be stones cleared by later farmers.

Herring thinks this setting came after the pillar and before the ring, and that stones 7 and 8 may have begun as part of it. The narrowest gap in the circle, 2.1 metres, falls here. The angled tops recall the facade stones of the Neolithic chamber tomb at Zennor, another Cornish site, not this one.

The circle sits where the view is deliberately small. Northward the slope closes the distance. Creeg Tol, a tor whose hill reaches 135 metres, is only 3.5 metres high in the rock itself, but it is skylined from the south-east, from the circle. The name has been read as Cornish cruc, a hillock or a barrow, and toll, a hole.

There is no barrow on the tor, despite a nineteenth-century suggestion that there was. Basins on the upper face of the top stone, up to 0.15 metres deep, were called the Giant's footsteps by John Thomas Blight. One later writer was shown a footprint said to have been made by a giant on the way up from the Isles of Scilly. Between Creeg Tol and the hill of Leah, Chapel Carn Brea closes the north-west view at 2.5 kilometres.

It carries a large cairn, possibly taking in an entrance grave, on the summit, and an unusual long cairn on the southern tor. Long cairns have been compared in plan and profile to stone axe-heads. If that long cairn is early Neolithic, it may already have stood when the pillar here was raised. To the south the plateau hides the deep valleys of Penberth, St Loy, and Lamorna.

One account says the Merry Maidens, the two Pipers, and the sea can all be seen from the circle. The 1999 survey found only a small glimpse of the sea, to the south-south-east, through a notch in Boscawen Cliff, and in that same direction the Pipers and the Merry Maidens stand pale against the skyline. A shift of a few metres farther south would hide the sea and both of those monuments. Land to the north, including Bartinney, Caer Bran, and Sancreed Beacon, cannot be seen from the ring.

The Merry Maidens and the Pipers are a neighbouring group. They are not part of this circle.

Two outlying standing stones are scheduled with the ring. One, about 400 metres to the north-east, stands up to 2.7 metres high and tapers from about a metre wide at the base to 0.4 metres at the top. Another, about 700 metres to the north-east, is built into a hedge and stands up to 2.2 metres high, 2 metres wide, and 0.4 metres thick, with a top that narrows to a point. Herring writes of one menhir a little over 300 metres to the north-east.

Its top was just visible over the hedges in the early twentieth century, and again in 1920, and later growth hid it from the circle. The distances do not agree, and the scheduled monument counts two outliers where the landscape study discusses one.

On the same autumn day in 1864, William Copeland Borlase opened two cairns a short distance south-east and south-west of the ring, with John Thomas Blight present. The south-eastern mound was an earthen barrow six to seven feet high. Ashes turned up often in a broad trench. Near the middle, in a pit cut into hard clay and covered by a flat stone, were more ashes, minute chips of calcined bone, and one or two nodules of bronze, probably the rivets of a dagger.

Two further pits lay beyond, and one of them held a few more ashes and bones. Blight noted a cist on the north side. The south-western mound was a ring of stones set on edge around a natural boulder called the Money Rock, twelve feet by eleven and two feet ten inches thick. A cavity in its upper face measured one foot six inches by one foot one inch.

It is not certain that the cavity was cut. Borlase's wording can be read that way. Blight only said that a cavity is sunk in the surface. Between the rock and the kerb, on the north-east, lay a broken saddle quern.

The diggers thought it had been thrown in because it was useless. Later reading allows that it may have been broken on purpose and placed there. A little to the south-east, a stone two feet six inches long stood on edge, and to its north were many calcined human bones, fragments of a large urn, and a small urn set mouth downward and filled with soil. More pottery lay on the south-west side of the boulder.

The western cairn was removed between 1876 and 1906, when two crofts were improved and the boundary that had run beside it was taken away. The south-eastern cairn remained mapped, but later farming has removed it. Neither mound can be seen now. An older public account says a burial mound near the circle held urns.

That matches these cairns. It does not match the empty trench inside the ring. Whether the chips of bone in the eastern barrow were human is assumed rather than demonstrated. The relationship of those dead to the people who raised the circle is not known.

Later, perhaps as early as the second millennium BC but more probably in the millennium after, small rectangular fields were laid out to the north-west of the circle. Their banks run from a long boundary and share one axis. One of them points toward the ring and fades about 80 metres short of it, either robbed of stone or lost under soil. It is not certain that the builders of the fields deliberately spared the circle.

Clearance heaps and low lynchets show some cultivation. No house was found with the fields. A second, rougher system of banks north-west of Creeg Tol, with occasional slabs on edge, was later cut by the road, and any settlement may lie on the more sheltered side of Lower Leha. Short banks east of the tor may be a third system.

The ground by Creeg Tol itself seems to have stayed open, fit for summer grazing in a mixed farm. An alluvial tin streamwork in the valley to the west is older than the meadows whose boundaries cross it, and it may be the working recorded at Leha moor in 1504. That is a late medieval or Tudor streamwork, not a Bronze Age mine dug at the circle.

The place-name is probably older than the Norman conquest. A secondary farm on this marginal down seems to be in place before 1319, when a grant of land at nearby Leah calls the spot Legha iuxta Boskawen. In West Penwith, settlements named bos are often secondary to older estates named tre. If Boscawen-Un and Boscawen-Ros shared the down, the moorland may have been common grazing and a source of furze, turf, and bracken before it was taken into private crofts.

The parish boundary of St Buryan runs along the northern edge of the down, following the road between fords near Lower Leha and Tregonebris. That line is probably the edge of land given by Athelstan to the church of St Buryan in or around 943. Camden's guess that the circle itself belonged to Athelstan's time is a different claim, and it is not the date used now. Through the early medieval centuries the stones stood in grazed ground and were not thrown down.

That is evidence of regard. It is not a script of the stories people told.

A Welsh triad has been taken to name this place. The phrase Beisgawen yn Nyfnwal, Boscawen in Dumnonia, was read by the founders of the Cornish bardic assembly as this circle, one of three principal gorsedds of the Island of Britain. John Thomas Blight, in 1861, gave Boscawen in Damnonium as one of three gorsedds of poetry, with Salisbury and Bryn Gwyddon in Wales. One account puts those triads in the sixth century.

The Welsh Triads are groups of three in medieval manuscripts, a way of keeping fragments of story, custom, and traditional history under a shared heading. Rachel Bromwich edited them as Trioedd Ynys Prydein. She taught Celtic languages and literature at Cambridge from 1945 to 1976, and she died in 2010. Her edition does not include this Boscawen triad among the triads she held to be securely medieval.

Iolo Morganwg, the bardic name of Edward Williams, who lived from 1747 to 1826, was received as a collector of medieval Welsh literature. After his death it was clear that he had forged manuscripts, notably some of the Third Series of Welsh Triads. He founded the Welsh Gorsedd, and the philosophy carried in his forgeries had a long effect on later neo-Druidism. His bardic name means Iolo of Glamorgan.

The Cornish assembly was modelled on the Welsh one. The choice of this circle in 1928 is described as the result of a Victorian belief that the triad was ancient. Blight and William Bottrell set the supposed gorsedd at these stones and understood it as a gathering for community, ritual, and ceremony. Bottrell hoped that Alfred Lord Tennyson would one day sing the Idylls of the King from a granite throne beside the pillar.

He did not.

Robert Hunt named Boscawen-Un among circles formed when maidens who danced on the Sabbath were turned to stone. Bottrell answered that such tales were not native, and that old people knew them only because visitors had read them in books and repeated them. The name Dawns Men, dancing stones, on the 1840 tithe map weakens the claim that the dancing story was wholly brought in from outside. The Merry Maidens have a legend of the same kind.

It belongs to that circle, not to this one.

For a long time the written fame of the place was slight, because the road from Penzance to Land's End ran through St Buryan and travellers met the Merry Maidens first. Daniel Defoe, in 1724, wrote of a circle of great stones not unlike those at Stonehenge, and it is supposed that he had not seen them. Between 1794 and 1796, W G Maton found the Merry Maidens smaller than he had been led to expect, and only later was told that the stones he ought to have seen were at Boscawen-Un. Thomas Martyn plotted this circle, with its centre stone, on his map of Cornwall in 1748.

The one-inch map of 1813 left Boscawen-Un off and showed the Merry Maidens, Tregeseal, and Boskednan. F W L Stockdale, in 1824, called it the most interesting druidical remain in the neighbourhood, nineteen stones set upright in a circle twenty-five feet across, with one large stone in the centre. Twenty-five feet is not the diameter of about twenty-five metres measured since. William Cotton drew the circle in 1826, with two more stones fallen than Borlase had shown.

John Barnatt later thought those were stones 5 and 9, but Cotton's plan is too poor to be sure. Cotton found the hedge through the circle awkward, and he showed it. Borlase's field sketch showed it too, though the published engraving left it out.

By the mid-nineteenth century the hedge was being treated as a disgrace, a sign that the circle had been left to the farmer. One account says Richard Edmonds first mentioned the hedge in 1850. The field evidence puts the boundary there by the middle of the eighteenth century, and on the tithe map of 1840 it divides two holdings, the lane from Boscawen-Un and Chyangwens opening into the crofts beside it. John Thomas Blight drew the hedge in 1861, with the church of St Buryan on the skyline.

Blight was born near Redruth in 1835. His father, a teacher, moved the family to Penzance and set his sons to nature, antiquities, and folklore. By twenty, Blight had published on the antiquities of Penwith. He quarrelled with patrons, including R S Hawker and James Halliwell, and in the mid-1860s he suffered a breakdown and was kept in the asylum at Bodmin until his death in 1911.

His drawings are now a record of monuments that have gone. Around 1862 he was probably the person who organised the removal of the hedge and the resetting of the three fallen stones. The work was credited to the owner, Elizabeth Carne of Penzance, as an example to other landowners. Carne, who lived from 1817 to 1873, was a writer, geologist, collector of minerals, and later a banker.

The tidying was done before a visit of the Cambrian Archaeological Society in 1862. In place of the bisecting hedge, a stone-faced bank with an outer ditch was built around the stones, with stiles for access. It is still there. It has been compared to a ha-ha.

It shut grazing animals out, and scrub has been a problem ever since. Blight was thanked, with others, for enclosing the circle within a strong fence.

In the autumn of 1864 Blight and William Copeland Borlase cut the trench across the ring and opened the two barrows. Borlase, who lived from 1848 to 1899, later sat in the House of Commons as a Liberal and left it in 1887 when bankruptcy and scandal ruined him. He was of the Borlase family, but he is not Doctor William Borlase, the rector of Ludgvan who drew the circle in 1754 and died in 1772. The younger Borlase wrote that nothing was discovered in the circle.

Blight wrote that nothing of interest appears to have been discovered. In August 1876, members of the British Archaeological Association were told that about a dozen years earlier the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society had dug a trench across the circle and found nothing, and Borlase told them the pillar had been found set on purpose at a lean. The trenches were poorly recorded. No plan gives their depth or their exact line.

The resetting of the fallen stones was poorly recorded in the same way.

W C Lukis, publishing with Borlase in 1885, was the first to say that one stone is a block of quartz. George Fox Tregelles described the circle again in the transactions of the local society in the early 1890s. In the 1960s Alexander Thom, a Scottish engineer who lived from 1894 to 1985 and argued for a megalithic yard, resurveyed the ring. He treated it as a regularly flattened circle made of several arcs and a standard measure.

That kind of geometry has since been set aside. In 1986 an experiment asked volunteers to lay out circles by eye, with buckets or poles. The ovals, eggs, and flattened rings they produced fell into much the same proportions as the real stone circles of Britain. John Barnatt's survey of 1982 was the fullest account of Boscawen-Un before the 1999 plan.

A L Lewis in 1906 and Norman Lockyer in 1909, and John Michell again in 1974, made the circle the crossing point of long alignments, many of them through the cromleh. Those lines were much debated and have not been generally accepted.

Cooke's axes stayed little known until the 1999 recording, although he had published them. Penwith District Council asked Cornwall Archaeological Unit in 1998 to assess the rough ground of Boscawen-Un farm before an application for countryside stewardship. Mike Rosendale commissioned the work. Herring and Bryn Tapper planned the circle at a scale of one to one hundred.

Inner faces were drawn at one to fifty, and the carved face at one to ten. Every stone was photographed. Paths, two small modern fire pits, thorn bushes, a cattle rub around the pillar, and the shallow line of the old hedge were plotted for later care. The study area covered 17 hectares, 42 acres, in the north-west corner of the tenement.

A total eclipse of the sun on 11 August 1999 was expected to draw large crowds. No damage was done then at this circle or at the other prehistoric monuments of Cornwall where people gathered. Craig Weatherhill, who lived from 1950 or 1951 until 18 July 2020, was the antiquarian whose place-name dictionary gives the reading of a single dwelling by the elders. He worked as a conservation officer at Penwith District Council, learned survey under the historian P A S Pool, and was made a bard of the Cornish Gorsedh in 1981, taking the name Delynyer Hendhyscans, draughtsman of archaeology.

In 2020 that body gave him its Awen award. His digging at Bosiliack Barrow in 1985, and his finding of the wells called Venton Bebibell, Venton Zennor, and Bosporthennis, are other places in Penwith, not this circle. The 1998 commission is credited to Mike Rosendale, not to Weatherhill.

Henry Jenner founded the modern gathering here in 1928, with others. Jenner was born at St Columb Major on 8 August 1848 and died on 8 May 1934. He was the chief originator of the revival of the Cornish language. In 1904 he brought Cornwall into the Celtic Congress.

In 1920 he jointly founded the Old Cornwall Society at St Ives. In 1928 he was a joint founder of Gorsedh Kernow, and the first ceremony was held at this circle. The choice is tied to the belief, already Victorian, that a medieval triad had named the place. Further ceremonies have been held on the spot, including the fiftieth anniversary in 1978.

Gorsedh Kernow is a non-political body. Since 1995 it has given awards for books about Cornwall, and it confers an Awen medal. Julian Cope, born in 1957, a musician and an author on Neolithic culture, published The Modern Antiquarian in 1998 and The Megalithic European in 2004. Those books belong to the modern writing about stone circles.

They are not a claim that he dug or planned this ring. In the same years the circle drew people interested in earth mysteries and in modern pagan practice. Most of that use has been respectful. Fires have scorched the turf, and coins have been hammered into cracks in the quartz.

A report was written of repair to a bonfire site after the late 1990s. In 1978 a television story, The Stones of Blood, took this circle as its setting. The episodes were filmed at the Rollright Stones, not here.

The circle was placed on the schedule of ancient monuments in 1934, with the list date 25 September 1934. It is described as surviving well despite the early digging and the resetting of stones, and as a place that can still hold evidence of how it was built, how long it was used, and what people did here, including burial. The vegetation has never stayed still. Cotton in 1826 showed coarse grass and small clumps of heather.

The tithe schedule of 1840 classes the fields on either side of the old hedge as crofts. In 1840 Thomas Roberts and Matthew Carthew owned and occupied the northern part of Boscawen Woone in mixed holdings. Richard Nicholas leased the crofts north of the circle. The Ankervis crofts to the south were leased by the same man and sublet to Edward Hosking.

Most of the surveyed ground was then rough grazing and fuel ground. Two valley meadows were classed as cultivable, and two others as furze and as morass. In 1862 the circle was overgrown with brambles and furze, cleared by 1865, so that the maps of 1876 and 1906 show rough grass inside the bank. A photograph of about 1906 shows tilled soil south of the stones, up to the bank, with rough grass inside the ring.

In 1912 the stones stood in what was called a circular patch of primeval moor, and lichens on the tip of the pillar were described as a pale gold crown. Those lichens were later gone. By 1920 bracken, heather, and furze were high. In 1926 the site was almost hidden by gorse and brambles.

A photograph published in 1932 shows the grass low again. By the early 1970s the bank was overgrown with thorns and the circle was besieged by gorse. Furze was cut back about 1979. Volunteers have cleared it in turns since.

The Cornish Ancient Sites Protection Network is named as the owner, and it cuts the scrub. County archaeological volunteers watch the condition of the stones as well.

A quarry was cut into the slope of Lidden Croft in the nineteenth century, and the circle lies only about 50 metres south of that working. The stones were not split for gateposts, though many moorstones round about were, some with the older wedge and groove and most with plugs and feathers. Protection of tors from splitters is recorded in the same decades on Bodmin Moor and at Trencrom and St Michael's Mount. Local belief in spriggans, sometimes taken for the spirits of giants, is another reason given for why people left famous stones alone.

The circle had also become a place travellers were told to see, which would have made open robbery harder.

In 2025 the standing circle was recorded again, this time by drone photogrammetry, for a European project concerned with language, heritage, and storytelling. Francesco Giuri, Ivan Ferrari, and Alfonsina Pagano made the model. It was published on 10 August 2026. It is a measured likeness of the stones as they stand.

It is not a new excavation, and it has not produced a new burial, a new axe, or a new inscription. The county record's last stated field check was 9 August 2022.

What the place changed, it changed by being kept and reread. A pillar shaped like an axe, and carved either with two axe-heads or with two feet, may have been set up while polished stone axes still carried meaning in west Cornwall. Greenstone for such axes has been traced toward Mount's Bay, the ground near St Just at Kenidjack, and the coast by St Ives, though a later argument doubts that there were true factory quarries, and fieldwalking on Clodgy Moor in Paul parish suggests that many axes were made from cobbles rather than from cliff rock. In Brittany, a pair of circles at Er Lannic has been argued to be a place where fibrolite axes were made and passed on, with dozens of complete and broken heads in the finds.

Nothing like that hoard came from the trench at Boscawen-Un. A small cist-like setting may then have been placed on the line of the lean. An oval of nineteen stones, or twenty if one is missing, was laid out by eye so that it looked round, open toward Creeg Tol, toward Chapel Carn Brea and its long cairn, toward a glimpse of sea, and toward the Pipers and the Merry Maidens. Two cairns took cremated bone and, in one case, bronze and pottery.

Later farmers made fields nearby, named the down from a settlement word and an elder or a moor, ran a hedge through the ring, and then, in the 1860s, took the hedge away and put fallen stones back. Antiquaries from Camden onward gave the circle to Romans, to Athelstan, to druids, to a standard measure, and to long straight alignments. In 1928 bards made it the first modern Cornish gorsedd, on the strength of a triad that the standard edition of the medieval triads does not secure. The stones that a visitor sees now include three that were put back in the 1860s, a Victorian bank, and carvings that two careful records do not read in the same way.