The light fades quickly as I am situated within the granite circle near St Just. The granite stones seem to shine in this melancholy terrain, akin to pale, inquisitive ghosts assembled around to witness our activities. Overhead, a expanse of brown bracken and gorse climbs toward the prominent outcrop, the sinister stone formation that dominates the open skyline. During the evening, this heath is reputed to be visited by supernatural beings, and reportedly a dark rider rides out to claim the departed.
Unconcerned by superstitious otherworldly danger, we look westward, toward the distant forms on the horizon that are the distant Isles of Scilly. The clouds part and a cascade of golden light washes over the islands. My guide, archaeoastronomer an authority on prehistoric astronomy, and I marvel. It is breathtaking an atmospheric display which may have been witnessed by the individuals who constructed this circle 4,000 years ago.
An Ancient Winter Solstice Landscape
We have met at Tregeseal to talk about the midwinter. Carolyn’s work examines the relationship of Cornwall’s prehistory with the cosmos, and she characterizes the entire Penwith region as an ancient winter solstice landscape. This, she explains, is because of the spine of granite that runs south-west along the peninsula, pointing toward the December sunset. If, for example, you are located at midwinter by the ancient burial chamber of Chûn Quoit – the capstoned tomb high on the moors south of Morvah – you will see the sun sink over Carn Kenidjack on the southwestern horizon. And likely this is just as Chûn Quoit’s ancient engineers intended.
"Where better to celebrate the return of the sun than on the Penwith peninsula, which is oriented directly at the vanishing spot of the sun on the year’s shortest day?"
It is proposed that this ancient monument was deliberately sited to allow people to view the midwinter sun sinking behind the Isles of Scilly. “Viewed from here, Scilly is a borderland. On a bright day with stable weather, the isles look nearby and just appear vividly. On different days, they’re entirely absent. The circle builders could have regarded Scilly as an realm of spirits, maybe a place of the dead, associated with the midwinter and the return of the light.”
Mysterious Monuments and Countdown Calendars
We weave through the shadowy brown moor past Bronze Age barrows and piles of industrial waste to a curious formation, which may be the UK’s only ancient row of stones with holes. In contrast to the stone at its more renowned counterpart a few miles away, it’s not feasible to squeeze through the Kenidjack holed stones; these openings are only just big enough to insert my hand through and very low to the ground. Researchers remain puzzled.
Carolyn’s theory is that the alignment might have functioned as a kind of midwinter timekeeping device, with the rising sun illuminating through the holes from late October until December and casting varying rays of sunlight in the stones’ shadows. “Feeling the glow of that ray of sunlight in the chilly, gloomy moor gave me a visceral appreciation of how prehistoric people might have experienced midwinter,” she says.
Too many ancient sites are oriented to the rising or setting of the sun at midwinter or midsummer for it to be a chance. It stands to reason that prehistoric farmers, who relied on the sun for illumination, heat and the growth of crops, would want to monitor the sun’s path. But in the 21st century, the gloom of this time of year still affects our spirits, and so we welcome the shortest day, that darkest day of all before the hours of light begin to lengthen again.
Ancient Markers and New Traditions
A bitter easterly is gusting, and strange low sounds rise from unseen cows as I hike through damp clover to pay a visit the solitary monolith, keeping watch as it has done for countless generations above the peninsula’s south coast. It is just one of scores of prehistoric stones that are solitary or in alignments all over the peninsula; less than a mile away are the famous petrified dancers, maidens frozen in granite for breaking the Sabbath. I think about how for ages the stone has endured here, witnessing its vista of the surrounding seas: where once Neolithic coracles would have floated, now cargo vessels and the Scilly ferry sail past.
"The Montol festival reinvigorates the old Cornish custom of disguised performance, with its detailed outfits, folk singing and music of pipe, drum and fiddle."
One artist's captivating film, which documents a full year in the existence of this stone, highlights the power of its still and silent being in the constantly shifting landscape. “And I deliberately opened and closed the film with the solstice,” he tells me, “because it is a time of unadulterated optimism – the promise of the conclusion of darkness and a sunny new year ahead.”
On the shortest day, all over West Penwith, people will be marking midwinter by walking to monuments, sacred springs, Iron Age sites and heritage sites. Excursions will be organized to observe the sunset. Many will walk to standing stones in a sort of ritual of introspection and new beginnings. Later, crowds will congregate into the harbour town for the midwinter event, a midwinter festival that {dates only to|was established in|originated in
