No. 12 1973 CORNISH ARCHAEOLOGY HENDHYSCANS
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No. 12 1973 CORNISH ARCHAEOLOGY HENDHYSCANS KERNOW COVER: Hayle Foundry, the splendour of a Victorian ruin - a recent sketch by our member Betty Rule. Cornwall Archaeological Society President PATRICIA M. CHRISTIE, F.S.A. I Vice-Presidents Miss DOROTHY DUDLEY, M.A., F.S.A. R. H. CORFIELD, B.A. C. A. RALEGH RADFORD, M.A., HON.D.LITT., F.B.A., F.R.HIST.S., F.S.A. Hon. Secretary MRS. BETTY GREENE, A.R.C.S., B.SC., 11 Alverton Court, Truro Hon. Treasurer T. P. F. TRUDGIAN, O.B.E., Trewen, Camelford, Hon. Editor Professor CHARLES THOMAS, M.A., F.S.A., Lambessow, St. Clement, Truro Hon. Photographic Editor CHARLES WOOLF, M.P.S., 7 Chester Road, Newquay Hon. Membership Secretary Miss PATRICIA M. CARLYON, Chytodden, Kenwyn, Truro Hon. Press Officer JOHN STENGELHOFEN, DIP.AA., 10 Alverton Court, Truro Hon. Legal Advisor P. A. S. POOL, M.A., F.S.A. Director (1973) ROGER MERCER, M.A. General Committee 1973 Ex officio PRESIDENT, VICE-PRESIDENTS, SECRETARY, TREASURER, EDITOR, DIRECTOR Elected: Miss P. BEST (St. Austell), Miss P. M. CARLYON (Truro), H. L. DOUCH, B.A. (Truro) A. GUTHRIE (St. Ives), MRS. M. M. IRWIN, B.SC. (Bodmin), MRS. HENRIETTA MILES, B.A. (Exeter), MRS. FLORENCE NANKIVELL (St. Ives), A. D. SAUNDERS, M.A., F.S.A. (London), PETER SHEPPARD (Gorran), JOHN STENGELHOFEN, DIP.A.A. (Truro), and CHARLES WOOLF, M.P.S. (Newquay) Co-opted: FRANK CHESHER, M.A. (Mullion), E. J. WIGLEY, B.E.M., M.B.E. and MRS. J. WIGLEY, representing the Wayside Museum, Zennor (affiliated) The Society's Area Correspondents, and all other standing Committees and Sub-Committees of the Society: see inside back cover. MEMBERSHIP OF THE SOCIETY is open to all individuals or groups interested in the history and material culture of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (persons under 16 being admitted at the discretion of the General Committee). The annual subscription (£2.00, or £1.00 for persons under 18 and for full-time students under 23) is payable each January 1st, and entitles members to receive a free copy of this, the Society's annual journal, the thrice-yearly Newsletter, and notification of all activities. At least one excavation is held annually, and the A.G.M. normally takes place in the Spring. Enquiries about membership should be sent to the Hon. Secretary; requests for any publication of the Society or of the former West Cornwall Field Club should be sent to Mrs. Edna Thompson, 32 Glamis Road, Newquay. Price to non-members: £2.50 Printed in Cornwall by Wordens of Cornwall Limited, Penzance CORNISH ARCHAEOLOGY NO. 12 1973 Editorial Neolithic and Upper Palaeolithic working sites, Booby's Bay, Cornwall PAUL F. WHITEHEAD A Note on the Aegean Sword-Hilt in Truro Museum ELLEN MACNAMARA Excavations at Trethurgy, St. Austell: Interim Report HENRIETTA and TREVOR MILES "Hulls" in Cornwall: a survey and discussion MICHAEL TANGYE An Eighteenth-century Prussian Cannon from Plymouth Sound PETER MACBRIDE Verses on the Logging-Rock (1815) JOHN NICHOLAS Series Excavation News, 1972-73 Digest of Cornish Periodicals: 11, 1972-73 Parochial Check-lists of Antiquities (GWYNNETH KING, PETER SHEPPARD) East: 1, St. Stephen's by Launceston; 2, St. Thomas; 3, St. Mary Magdalene; 4, Lawhitton Short Notes Recent Finds from Boscastle R. D. PENHALLURICK The Amherst Gun Battery, Kingsand PETER SHEPPARD A Pebble Mace-Head from St. Germans GEOFFREY BERRIDGE Finds from a Coin Collection at Falmouth R. T. BROOKS Reviews Editorial FOR OUR SOCIETY, the year 1973 has been one of progress, consolidation and some few changes. At the Annual General Meeting in Truro on April 14th, Andrew Saunders retired from the Presidency, after a four-year term of office to which he brought not only his personal enthusiasm for the past in Cornwall, but the experience and stature clearly gained in the course of his public duties. Fittingly, the illustrated lecture at the A.G.M., which he gave as a farewell gesture, con- cerned his work at Launceston Castle. Launceston, as all those who drive through it will know, often claims to be "the gateway to Cornwall". It is certainly the major gateway, if not the only- one; and the excavations of the Castle site, planned as a long-term campaign, will eventually result in giving us a guardianship monument of the greatest historical interest. One might ex- press the hope here that the setting will be worthy of the jewel, and that the historic town of Launceston will not undergo too radical a transformation during the rest of this century, but will preserve for the enquiring eye something of the flavour of the medieval ages (and later periods) still inherent in the many delightful buildings and small streets. Our new President, Patricia Christie, will be well known to all active members of the Society, and indeed to anyone concerned with Cornish archaeology. Much of her childhood was spent in the county, and she married into a distinguished military family. Her excavation experience is wide and, in recent years, she, too, has been engaged in a prolonged campaign designed to clarify the problems of a permanent guardianship site, the fogou and associated village at Cam Euny, Sancreed. Apart from the light shed on the origins and dates of the West Cornwall fogous by her meticulous excavation of the passage and round chamber—and this was something of an en- gineering feat—her many seasons there have enriched the corpus of Iron Age pottery in the region, and have shown that, even in the wake of earlier and less well-recorded digging, it is still possible to recover the essentials of a site of this complexity. This year, too, has seen the fourth (and, for the moment, final) season of the Society's excava- tions at Carn Brea, conducted by our Director, Roger Mercer. A brief report appeared in our October Newsletter (no. 13) and many members will have visited the site during the work. As this is probably the last major research excavation, spread over several seasons and inevitably the victim of escalating costs, that the Society is likely to sponsor in the short-term future, the conclusion of the campaign prompts a few afterthoughts. That the effort has been justified is not in any sense to be doubted. Progress nationally in our knowledge of the Neolithic, the period which saw the birth of British agriculture and the first major attempts to manage the British landscape, depends partly on the recovery of chance finds and the study of their distribution, and partly upon the additional chronological precision now afforded by radio-carbon estimates of dates. It is rare indeed now to find the excavation of a major settlement, something that adds both to the body of finds and to the opportunities for dating; the work at Carn Brea has done just this, in abundance, but it offers something more. It has been clear for some time that the causewayed camps of southern Britain, however debateable their real functions, cannot be and are not the only large- scale settlements of this period. Without going as far as to use the term "hill-fort", one could say that Neolithic settlements on high ground, surrounded by large tracts of deciduous woodland, have been indicated for some time, simply by the occurence of finds or (as in this case) by the ill-reported results from much earlier work. Roger Mercer's investigations have now given us, in some detail, the outlines of such a settlement, even if no new archaeological term in the English language has yet been evolved to describe this class. 3 His properly cautious interim reports indicated the directions along which a final report— perhaps, in this case, of monograph size—will eventually appear, and it is bound to create enormous interest. The question nevertheless arises as to whether in 1974 and onwards social and financial condi- tions will make it possible for the Society to mount major set-piece excavations for its members. In our case, the custom appears to stem from a pre-war state, in which membership was small, the sites chosen for excavation relatively confined, and the dates selected for the convenience of that majority of members who were either schoolteachers or could choose the period for their holidays. Today, apart from the increasing costs of board and lodging, our members experience difficulty in correlating their holidays, many of them being family men or women who feel obliged to spend such time in other ways. Many of our members, too, are engaged in agriculture, or in the holiday trade, or in all-the-year-round commerce; and for them the summer is a busy time. Increasingly, therefore, we have had to draw upon student labour and the great national pool of self-employed volunteers, and this last season saw the unusual step of making cash payments as well as subsidising their keep. In other words, the Society's members are sponsoring excavations, but are not necessarily able to take part in them. Experience elsewhere suggests that a pattern of small excavations, generally of a kind described as "rescue" rather than "research", which take place throughout the year or are centred on weekends, are far more likely to enable those who wish to dig actually to do so. Taken in conjunction with current national trends in archaeological emphasis, this may well prove to be a guideline for our Society's future. A final note on the contents of this issue: an item is missing from that section which we call Serials. This is the Cumulative Index of Cornish Archaeology, but its absence in this issue does not imply its abandonment.