Holiday Diary 4: The Three Brothers of Grugwith

Day 7 of our holiday, and time to escape the confines of the West Penwith peninsula, but not too far! We drove the short distance from the westernmost peninsula, to the southernmost – the Lizard.

We’ve covered many of the sites on the Lizard here before but I wanted to return to the Three Brothers of Grugwith site near St Keverne, where the volunteers from the Lizard Ancient Sites Network (LAN) have recently been busy at work clearing the scrub.

And a marvelous job they’ve made of it too! Where previously I could barely make out the burial chamber (was it a cist, a dolmen or natural setting?) the entire site is now cleared, bar a pile of cut scrub temporarily left nearby, allowing for some interpretation of the monument.

There are three main stones, a large earthfast stone, rectangular in shape, half of which is flat and around a foot or so high, with the other half rising to three of four feet. There is an obvious cup mark on one of the high corners of this stone. A couple of feet away from this is another earthfast stone, upright to the same approximate height, and about the same width. These two are topped by a capstone, which also has cupmarks on it – I counted 3 definite and a couple of possibles.

Although the area of scrub abounds with natural stones, the immediate area is largely clear of stones, with a singular large exception, against which the cleared scrub was piled. Other than that, slightly further away are a couple of arcs of stones, which are very open to interpretation. Kerbstones? A circle of toppled stones? Investigation is under way to try to understand the site – James Gossip of Cornwall Council’s Historic Environment Service has produced the plan shown below of those stones uncovered so far, and has kindly allowed its inclusion here.

As stated, interpretation is far from certain as things stand at the moment. Another clearup has been scheduled, and should have been completed by the time you read this, so the picture may be much clearer. There are also plans to clear a wider area in an effort to identify which are natural stones and which have been placed. A write-up of the clearances will appear in the Cornwall Archaeology Society newsletter in due course.