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Sacred Trees 1 2
on which rests a thin slab, inserted over the well door. It
bears the following inscription : " Saint Columba used this
well when he preached the Gospel and built an Abbey here,
A.D. 550. Here angels shall enjoy my sacred cell, my Sloe,
my Nut, mine Apple among wells." The graveyard is about
eighty or ninety years old, the well cover about forty or fifty
years.
Two important examples of holed stones are described by
the late Rev. W. C. Lukis in his Prehistoric Monuments of the
British Isles, published for the Society of Antiquaries, London,
1885. One of these, called the Tolven, situated near St Buryan,
has been used superstitiously within living memory for curing
infirm children of their diseases by passing them through it
the other, near Madron, is called the Men-an-Tol. Both are
on Plate XII. The Tolven, a slab of large dimensions, has a
hole sixteen and a half inches in diameter bored through its
centre ; this was made by picking away the opposite sides
equally. This stone was shifted from its original site by the
tenant of the house behind which it stands, in order to make
room for a pathway to his back door. The Men-an-Tol is
on the moors, a short distance to the right of Lanyon Farm-
house, in the direction of Kara Galva. The hole in this
latter stone is not a perfect circle, being twenty-one inches in
diameter in one direction and eighteen inches in the other.
It stands exacdy midway between two high stones, which are
in the same line with it in the direction N.-H. and S.-W.
The hole has been made in the same manner as that in the
Tolven—with this difference, the counter-sinking is not equal.
This, it is obvious, was intentional—the deeper sinking
is on the eastern side of the stone. One of the most in-
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