The following is a list of bronze objects found at Lelant about the year 1802, from Evans’ ‘Ancient Bronze Implements of Great Britain:’

(All these are described, and some engraved, in ‘Archæologia,’ vol. xv., p.118.)

The Roman conquest of Cornwall was but a nominal one, and left the ancient Cornish in a state of practical independence. Hence our country has little to show in the way of Roman remains. ‘In 1702, in the parish of Towednack, between St. Ies and the Land’s End, were found under a prodigious rock of Moor-stone, called the Giant’s Rock, a large flat stone, supported by four pillars of the same, an Urn full of ashes with a round ball of earth by the side of it, and in the said ball fourscore silver Coins of the latter Emperors, very fair and well preserved. I could not have the sight of more than five of them, of which I got three, of Valentian I., Gratian, and Arcadius; the rest were seized for the Lord of the Soil.’ (Mr. Tonkin’s letter to Bishop Gibson, Aug. 4, 1733, M.S.B., p.224, cited in a footnote in Dr. Borlase’s History.)

Gilbert, quoting Hicks, says that in Towednack one Paul Quick dug up a large stone which rested on another placed slopeways, and found thirty small silver Roman coins, two of which he gave to Mr. Hicks. They bore on the obverse a head with the legend ‘Valentiniana Cæsar Augustus’; reverse, Fortune sitting on a wheel: ‘Urbs Roma.’ This seems to be the same find as the one referred to above by Tonkin.

On the slope of Carn Ellis, overlooking Saint Ives, is an ancient erection which must be noticed now. It is an ironstone ‘crellas,’ or British hut-dwelling, of vert great antiquity. This relic was examined in 1882, by Mr. William Copeland Borlase (great-grandson of Dr. Borlase, the historian of Cornwall), in presence of the members of the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society. Mr. Borlase said this hut was like the ‘Picts’ houses’ of Scotland, but unlike anything else in Cornwall. The walls are oval in shape, wide at the bottom, narrowing towards the top. On entering, one walks through a narrow passage to an inner door, from which another similar passage leads to the interior of the whole structure.

In a field a little higher than the new cemetery, near the hamlet of Ayr, is what appears to be the remains of another ancient round hut, consisting of a circular mound of earth and stones, about fourteen feet in diameter, with an entrance on the north west. In the middle is a heap of loose smooth local slate-stones, collected from the remains of the crellas.

Near the western extremity of the parish of Zennor, on lands of the farm called Bosphrennis is a collection of the remains of very ancient hut dwellings, which have been fully described by the Rev. E.L. Barnwell, in the ‘Archæologia Cambrensis.’ The best preserved of these huts is figured in several drawings in the appendix to Blight’s ‘Churches of West Cornwall.’ It consists of two chambers, one circular, the other rectangular, with a communicating doorway. the principal entrance, through the wall of the circular compartment, has a lintel composed of three slabs of granite; a few feet from it, in the same wall, is another very narrow doorway. In the circular chamber earch course overlaps that beneath, whereby a perfect dome was formed, but the roof has fallen in. In the end of the rectangular chamber is a small window, which Mr. Barnwell considers almost unique. The entire structure much resembles the ancient oratories of Ireland, and the rude buildings which in Wales are popularly termed ‘Gaels’ churches.’ Blight says:

This bee-hive hut stands in the angle of a small enclosure, the hedges of which are built of the stones which at one time formed other similar structures, and which were destroyed by a former tenant, but within the remembrance of the person now occupying the estate. In an adjoining field are the remains of the foundations of rectangular chambers surrounded by a rudely constructed circle; and at a distance of a few hundred yards, among furze and heath, are traces of circular enclosures.

At a short distance from the hut-dwellings above described is the Bosphrennis cromlech, now fallen. ‘It consisted of four supporters, three feet six inches high, forming a complete kistvaen six feet by three; and what is very remarkable, the covering stone is circular, measuring four feet ten inches in diameter and five inches thick. The stone must certainly have been wrought into this form, and it seems to afford the only known instance of the kind.’ (Blight.) This seems to be the cromlech referred to by Courtney.

The Bosphrennis huts were visited in 1889 by the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society, when it was remarked that Mr. Arthur Mitchell, who visited the Outer Hebrides in 1866, saw in Lewis and Harris twenty or thirty huts like those of Bosphrennis. ‘They were called bo’h, or bothan, and were used as sheelings or summer residences by the herdsmen on the upper pastures.’ Examined in detail, one of the scottish huts agreed in almost every particular with the Bosphrennis huts, and was at the time inhabited; the smaller apartment being used as a store room and dairy, the larger and outer as the living-room.

At Bosullow, in Zennor, are the remains of another similar prehistoric British village, the lower courses of the rude walls of the huts being distinctly traceable. These remains were visited by the Penzance Antiquaries in 1883.