A Muddy, Sleeping Giant at Chun Quoite

More from Brisons Veor Residency, Cape Cornwall

This is a record of another of our adventures on our artists and writers residency at Brisons Veor in Cornwall.

We park by a container in a tiny car park and follow the muddy farm track towards the giant stone mushroom on the horizon. The mud deepens, thick and gloopy, and we sidetrack where others obviously have before us, taking a smaller rut through scraggly heather and spikey gorse. We turn at a locked gate, consulting the map to find we are on ‘Woon Gumpus’ common, a name that encourages all kinds of imaginings.

The muddy puddles here are topped with a skin of ice, white swirls in some places and in others just a clear thick layer of solid frost. We climb a stile and follow the track past grazing cows that a sign informs us are kept in place by invisible fencing. We are heading for Chun Quoite, a neolithic monument, and we can see it sprouting on the ridge of the horizon, even while the path twists and takes us away from it. When we finally get close the gargantuan scale is evident - four huge granite plates like walls or legs, then a huge 3m slab across the top like a table. How could anyone possibly have made this?

It is believed to date from 2400 bc. There is a legend that it was the burial place of the giant Old Denbras, who lost a wrestling match with a young man called Tom - who inherited the giant’s land and nearby castle on the condition that he would bury the giant here, at his favourite hillside seat, facing the sea. The capstone of the quoite hid the giant forever from the light of the sun.

We walked round it, this huge monument out on its own in the middle of the moor, peered in through the gaps between the stones. It is easy to imagine bones inside, half buried in the dirt floor, but all there is to see is scrub and grass, hard earth and a few smaller rocks, hidden inside the large ones. Its surface is spotted with white and grey lichen and from most angles it reminds me of a giant mushroom, sprouting from the bracken. It boggles my mind to think how long these stones have been here, how many people have looked at it, passed it, walked and worked around it.

On the way back we take a different path, and find this way even more boggy. The path is gone entirely, a small lake sprung up in its place and we’re forced off around the edges, jumping from one tussock of springy long grass to another. Every step is uncertain, every foothold wobbling, with the constant possibility of putting a foot wrong and losing a boot. So much of the moss is floating, the land squishy and sinking, more water than earth. For at least 200 metres we hop from one wobbly foothold to the next, sometime stopping to wonder if we’re getting any closer, sometimes moving fast before the land can grab ahold. And then, finally, we are out, through the deep purple heather and browning bracken, and onto solid land again, the huge stone mushroom still looming on the horizon behind us.