Lanyon Quoit stood on the Penwith landscape for more than five thousand years, until it fell down in 1815. A few years later they put it back up again and, though somewhat diminished in height and facing a different direction, it remains an imposing testament to the Neolithic people who built it.

We’ve added two Lanyon Quoit panoramas to the site. One shows it standing in the landscape, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the other provides an interesting view from underneath the stone. It feels pretty stable but, given that it’s fallen down once already in its relatively recent past, this wasn’t a place we felt comfortable remaining in for too long.

Just down the road is the holed stone know as Men-an-Tol, reputed to cure rickets and back pain (it’s known locally as the Crick Stone) and tell the future. There’s also a myth that women who passed backwards through the stone seven times under a full moon would become pregnant. Presumably, back then, sex hadn’t been invented yet.