Men-an-Tol

The Men-an-Tol is a small alignment of three granite stones on the open moor between Madron and Morvah, its centerpiece a disc-shaped stone pierced by a hole large enough to crawl through. Archaeology suggests the stones are the remnant of a Neolithic or Bronze Age circle rearranged long before anyone wrote about them; the first written account, from 1749, already shows an arrangement different from today's.

The folklore, though, has been continuous and vivid: the Crick Stone was believed to cure rickets and backache, children passed naked through the hole nine times as the remedy's course, and a changeling legend holds that the stone reversed a fairy swap. Today it remains a favorite of Cornish pagans and visitors, sometimes used in rebirth and transformation rites, a textbook example of a modest prehistoric monument carrying an unbroken folk practice into the present.

Visiting

No operator or fee; the stones are open access from the small parking on the Madron-Morvah lane, a half-mile walk up the track, stile entry.

Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:M%C3%AAn-an-Tol), CC BY 3.0.