This site is of disputed antiquity. If you have any information that could help clarify this site's authenticity, please post below or leave a post in the forum.
I have been intrigued by the Giants Hedge for many years...Living in Looe at it's supposed eastern end I could never understand why it was called giant..it is just like any other hedge...more like a bank as it runs through Kilminorth Woods beside the West Looe river.
It is only when you see it towards its western end at Lerryn that you realise it is no ordinary field boundary.
But when does it date from?...the general consensus is that it is post Roman...so it really should not be on here, but...
There are several Iron Age and older settlements inside the hedge (between it and the sea), but then again there are a good dozen or so barrows just to the north of it....but none as grand inside.
Walking along the top of a short section of it this morning i noticed how good the view was across the Cornish countryside. It does in many places run along the side of a steep escarpment..and if topped off with a wooden fence would have been quite impenetrable.
Whatever it's history, I'm sure no giants were involved in its building.......just some very hard working Cornishmen of old.
...and I would love to know where the bit is that's 8 yards across !
THE GIANT'S HEDGE
This Dark Ages earthwork ran at least from Looe to Lerryn, south of Lostwithiel, probably marking and defending the border of a Cornish Kingdom, often supposed to be that ruled by King Mark of the Tristram and lseult (Tristan and Isolda) story.
Dr Keith Ray, the County Archaeologist for Oxfordshire, who is making a special study of the Giant's Hedge, is convinced that it originally continued on the west side of the River Fowey and was defended there by Castle Dore.
Remains of other such forts are dotted elsewhere along the Hedge, such as Hall Rings and the one above Yearle's Wood, close to the site of St Nonna's Chapel . In some places it is still twelve feet high, and where it is best preserved (for example, in Willake Wood) it is stone-faced and flanked by a ditch.
"Even 180 years ago," writes Andrew foot in his history of St Veep, "it was sixteen feet high and ten feet broad so that fencibles in Quiller Couch's book, 'The Mayor of Troy Town', could march along its entire length.
What a tremendous labour it must have been to build, 1200 years or more ago, with nothing more than basic tools. " At the Looe end it is not well preserved, but is still recognisable in places, a bank following the contours fairly near the eastern or southern edge of the wood, although it would originally have been built out in the open, probably topped by a hedge (wall) or fence.