The whole of the Cornish moors, like Dartmoor,
are strewn with prehistoric villages and towns of
circular houses, sometimes within rings of rude
walling that served as a protection to the settlement,
and connected with enclosures for the cattle against
wolves. But though in many cases the doorways
remain, of upright jambs with a rude lintel of granite
thrown across, complete examples roofed in are rare,
and those to which we direct attention now are
known to very few persons indeed. The huts in
question measure internally from six to eight feet in
diameter ; the walls are composed of moorstones
rudely laid in courses, without having been touched
by any tool or bedded in mortar. The walls are
some two to three feet thick. Sometimes they are
formed of two concentric rings of stones set upright
in the ground, filled in between with smaller stones,
but such huts were never stone-roofed. Beehive-roofed they were, but with their dome formed of oak
boughs brought together in the centre, the ends
resting on these walls, and the whole thatched with
straw or heather or fern. But the stone-built and
roofed huts have walls of granite blocks laid in
courses, and after five feet they are brought to dome
over by the overlapping of the coverers, in the
primitive fashion that preceded the invention of the
arch.
The roof was thus gathered in about a smoke-hole, which was itself finally closed with a wide, thin granite slab, and thus the whole roof and sides were buried in turf, so that the structure resembled a huge ant-hill. Most of this encasing flesh and skin has
