Notable Landmarks · Madron, Cornwall
Mên-an-Tol
Cornwall's famous fertility stone — crawl through the ring to conceive. The fertility/healing folklore is genuinely recorded, though the 'seven times at full moon' formula is largely a modern accretion.
The story
On the moor between Madron and Morvah in far-west Cornwall stands the Mên-an-Tol — "the holed stone" — a round granite slab with a clean circular hole through it, flanked by two uprights so that from one angle the three read as "101". Its oldest folklore is medical: for generations children with rickets or scrofula were passed naked through the hole, three or nine times and against the sun, to be cured. That earned it its other name, the Crick Stone. The fertility legend — that a woman passing backwards through the hole seven times at the full moon will conceive — is later and much more thinly evidenced, the kind of story that gathers around a suggestive shape.
And the shape itself may be a rearrangement. In 1993 the archaeologist Ann Preston-Jones, writing in Cornish Archaeology after survey work by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit, concluded that the stones have been moved — probably in the early nineteenth century — and that the monument may once have formed part of a stone circle, with the holed stone standing elsewhere within it. The westernmost stone was brought into line only after 1815. So the neat little "101" we photograph is, in its present form, barely two centuries old. The hole is genuinely prehistoric; the arrangement is Georgian.
That gap — between an ancient object and a recent ritual — is the whole point. The wish to bargain with a stone for a healthy child is old and real and found wherever there are big old stones. The specific rite, and even the specific set-up of the stones, usually turns out to be far younger than the folklore claims. Mên-an-Tol is Bronze Age in origin but early-modern in staging, a monument reassembled by the same Romantic era that loved to imagine druids everywhere. Visitors still pose with their heads through the hole. It sits on a moorland footpath off the Madron–Morvah road; wear boots, and don't expect to conceive by moonlight.
More stories at this spot
- Fertility ritual recorded in Cornish folklore; the stones were realigned after 1815, per Ann Preston-Jones, 'The Men-an-Tol Reconsidered,' Cornish Archaeology 32 (1993).
Sources
- History Hit
- Cornwall Guide
- English Heritage (Castlerigg history)
- Historic England (Mên-an-Tol)
- Historic England (Rudston Monolith)
- Voices from the Dawn / Wikipedia (Giant's Ring)
- Historic Cornwall (summarising Ann Preston-Jones 1993, Cornish Archaeology)
Nearby on the map
Cornwall's riotous May Day rite where being caught under the 'Oss means a baby (or a husband) within the year. The 'ancient pagan fertility rite' story is a 20th-century folklorist invention (per Ronald Hutton), though the custom itself is genuinely old.
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LegendSpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.