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HOLED STONES, as they are called, are numerous in Cornwall, the size of the opening varying considerably; that at Men-an-Tol, for instance, is more than a foot in diameter, whilst others are but a few inches long.
A curlew piped; a lizard rustled into a tussock of grass where pink bog-heather and seeding cotton grasses splashed the sodden ground; a dragon-fly from the marsh stayed a moment upon Men-an-tol, and the jewel of his eyes was a little world holding all the colors of the larger.
But the roots of these fables burrow back to paganism. Hundreds of weakly infants were passed through Men-an-tol the stone with a hole or the "crick-stone" in the names of saints; and hundreds had already been handed through it centuries before under like appeal to pagan deities.
But some liked the crick-stone better for lil baabies than even the Madern brook." "Men-an-tol that stone is called?" "So 'tis, awnly us knaws it as the crick-stone. Theer's a big hole in en, an' if a cheel was passed through nine times runnin', gwaine 'gainst the way of the sun every time, it made en as strong as a lion.
Thus the famous Kit's Coty House in Kent was certainly not a dolmen, though it is now impossible to say what its form was. Wayland the Smith's Cave was probably a three-chambered corridor-tomb covered with a mound. The famous Men-an-tol in Cornwall may well be all that is left of a chamber-tomb of some kind. It is a slab about 3-1/2 feet square, in which is a hole 1-1/2 feet in diameter.
Here the heath was blasted and scarred with summer fires. Great patches of the waste had been eaten naked by past flames, and Men-an-tol the "crick-stone" past which she progressed, stood with its lesser granite pillars in a dark bed of scorched earth and blackened furze-stems stripped bare by the fire. She stood in a wide, desolate cup of the Cornish moor.
In Cornwall there are two holed stones, one called Tolven, situated near St. Buryan, and the other called Men-an-tol, near Madron, which have been used within living memory for curing infirm children by passing them through the aperture.
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