After we returned to the car, we decided to visit the tin mining area on the west coast between Penzance and St Ives. We headed for the Levant Mine. It is now owned and operated by the National Trust. At some stange we took a wrong turn which put us a little further north than we had intended - but the bonus was that we got to see a dolmen standing in a field quite close to the country road. We stopped to photograph the dolmen along with the wild flowers and herbs that were growing profusely along the sides of the road. Lanyon Quoit is a chambered tomb. The exact purpse of the structure is unknown. Originally (3000 - 4000 BC), dolmens (or quoits) contained communal burials -possibly of individual bones retrieved from decomposed bodies rather than fesh burials - but they may have been a focal point for the community. Later people re-used these structures for their own ceremonies and burials, and of course they attracted early tomb robbers, so very little remains intact for arhaeologists to study today.
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