When Tristram and Ysonde were driven from the Court of Mark, King of Cornwall, they fled to a forest of “holts and hills,” and there found and inhabited an “erthe house” which “etenes, bi old dayse had wrought;” that is to say, a house constructed by the giants of old. King Mark came that way one day when hunting, and looking in saw Ysonde asleep, with a patch of sunlight about to fall on her closed eyes through the tiny orifice which alone served as chimney and window to the “erthe house;” and, very considerately, he stuffed his glove into the hole, so as to prevent her sleep being broken.[13]

That earth house built by the vanished race of the giants was, there can be little question, a bee-hive hut such as are to be found over the Cornish moors. When Thomas of Erceldoune wrote in the thirteenth century, the origin of these bee-hive huts was already lost in fable.

Of these bee-hive huts there remain thousands—nay, tens of thousands—in more or less ruinous condition, on the Cornish moors and on Dartmoor. They are found also in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. The structure of the bee-hive hut is this:—

A circle was described in the grass, in diameter from 6 feet to 9 feet. Then a second circle, concentric, 3 feet beyond the first, that is to say, with a diameter 12 feet to 15 feet. Stones were set up on end in the ground where these circles had been described, and walls of horizontal slabs were laid between and on these uprights, their interstices filled in with moss and turf. After the walls had been carried to the height of four feet, the horizontal courses were drawn together inwards, so as to form a dome of overlapping slabs, and in the centre an opening was left to admit light and to serve as a smoke-hole, but sufficiently small to be easily closed with a stone or a wad of turf. On the south side of this bee-hive habitation a door was contrived by planting two jambs in the soil at right angles to the walls, standing about 2 feet 6 inches high, and placing over these a broad flat slab as lintel, on which the structure of the dome could be continued, and could rest.

There are several of these huts still in existence as perfect as when first made. One is on the Erme on Dartmoor; it is almost buried in heather, and might be passed without observation as a mere mound. The door remains, and it will serve the pedestrian, as it has served many a shepherd, as a place of refuge from a shower. There are three or four under and on Brown Willy, the highest peak of the Cornish moors. Connected with one of these is a smaller hut of similar structure that served apparently as a store chamber.

Comparatively few are perfect. The vast majority have fallen in. All were not originally domed over with stones, some—the majority—were roofed over by planting sticks in the walls and gathering them together in the centre, and then thatching them with reed, or packing turf round the beams. This we judge from the ruins. Some give evidence of having been domed, by the amount of stone that has fallen within the circle of the foundations; others, on the other hand, are deep in turf and peat, and show no fallen stones within the ring.

Very often clusters of these circular hovels are enclosed within a circular wall of defence. The villages were, in a word, defended against assault. At Grimspound on Dartmoor is such a walled village. The pound contains four acres; a stream is ingeniously diverted from its course and brought within the enclosure. There remain the ruins of about twenty-five huts, but there are scattered heaps that indicate the former existence of other habitations which have been destroyed. Near Post Bridge, in the heart of Dartmoor, are the remains of something like fourteen village enclosures, whereof one contains about forty of these huts.[14] An account of a very numerous and remarkable group within fortifications, near Holyhead, was published by the Hon. W. O. Stanley in 1871. He explored the settlement with the spade.

Who inhabited these bee-hive huts? Certainly the tin-workers. Mr. Stanley satisfied himself that the dwellers in the bee-hive huts of Holyhead were metal-workers. He found their tools, fused metal, and scoria. The villages in Cornwall and on Dartmoor have unaccountably been left unexplored, but there is some evidence to show that they were occupied by those who “streamed” for tin.

It is remarkable how folk-tradition has preserved some reminiscence of a large and of a small race as existing in Northern Europe before the Keltic wave, and also before the Scandinavian wave rolled west. The smallest race is generally associated in tradition with the rude stone monuments. The dolmens are cabannes des fees, or caves of dwarfs; whereas the giants are spoken of as inhabiting natural caverns. The early mythical sagas of the Norse are full of such mention, and the pedigrees give us evidence of the intermarriage between the newly-arrived Scandinavians and the people they found in the land before them. It is certainly a remarkable coincidence that the cave men, as revealed to us by the skeletons of the VÉzÈre, of SolutrÈ, and Mentone, should have been men of about seven feet high. When the Cymri and Gaels invaded our isles, a population of blended blood was subjugated, and became vassal to the Kelt, worked for it in the mines, and tended the flocks on the wolds, and the swine in the oak woods for the new masters. The Kelt knew the use of iron. He had not come from the East in quite the same way as the people of rude stone monuments. He came along the shores of the Black Sea, passed up the Danube, and, crossing the Rhine, poured over the Jura and the Vosges into the plains of Gaul. He met the stone monument builder at the head waters of the Seine, and drove him back; he stopped his passage of the Rhine; and it is possible that it was this arrest which forced the polished-stone man to cross the Pyrenees and people the Iberian peninsula.

We have strayed from our subject—the bee-hive hut. On no part of Dartmoor have the miners worked so vigorously and so continuously as on the East Webber, at Vitifer. Here, on a slope, is to be found a collection of bee-hive hut foundations. The ground below, above, and along one side has been turned up to the depth of fourteen to twenty feet; but the tin searchers have avoided the little settlement, leaving the huts on a sort of peninsula of unworked gravel, a clear evidence that the workers were those who occupied these huts. When we come to the date of these habitations we are unable to arrive at any very satisfactory conclusion. Some of these settlements certainly date back from the age of the rude stone monument builders, and to that of the polished stone weapons.

It is noticeable in Cornwall and on Dartmoor that the clusters of hut circles are generally associated on the one hand with tin stream works, and on the other with avenues and circles of upright stones, and that the heights of the hills near them are topped with cairns that contain kistvaens, or graves of rude stones, set on end and capped with large granite coverers. It may be taken as almost certain that where there is a large cluster of these dwellings, there will be found some megalithic monument hard by, or if not, that the enclosures, or the moor, will bear some name, such as Ninestones, or The Twelve Men (Maen = a stone), that testifies to there having been a circle there, which has been destroyed. With tin works the circles of hut foundations are invariably associated. In Holyhead, where is the cluster of bee-hive huts examined by Mr. Stanley, there also are to be found the Meinihirion, long stones, two stones standing ten feet apart, rising eleven feet above the soil, and originally surrounded by a circle of upright stones, now removed to serve as gate posts, or to form fences. There is sufficient evidence to show that the first builders of the bee-hive huts were the men of that race which erected the rude stone monuments in our island, and who also worked the tin. But what race was that? It was not Keltic. It was in our island before the Britons arrived. We can trace its course of migration from the steppes of Asia by the monuments it erected. This mysterious people came to the Baltic and followed its shores, some crossed into what was afterwards Scandinavia, but the main tide rolled along the sea-shore. They have left their huge stone monuments in Pomerania, in Hanover. They crossed the Rhine, and from Calais saw the white cliffs of Albion and one large branch of the stream invaded and colonised the British Isles. Another, still hugging the sea, passed along the coast of Gaul to Brittany, thence descended the shores of the Bay of Biscay, sent settlers up the Seine, the Loire, and the Dordogne, swept on into the Iberian peninsula, crossed into Africa, and after setting up circles and dolmens in Algeria, disappeared. They never penetrated to the centre of Germany; the Oder, and the Elbe, and the Rhine offered them no attractions. They were a people of rocks and stones, and they were not attracted by the vast plains of Lower Germany; they never saw, never set up a stone in the highlands, in the Black Forest, or the Alps. But it was otherwise with the great rivers of Gaul; with the sole exception of the Rhone they followed them up. Their monuments are numerous on the Loire; they are as dense in the upper waters of the Lot and Tarn as they are among the islets and on the headlands of Brittany. It is doubtful if they ever set foot in Italy. Such was the course taken by the great people which migrated to Europe. But another branch had separated at the Caspian, and had turned South. It passed over the Tigris and Euphrates, and occupied both Palestine and Arabia. The Palestine exploration has led to the discovery of numerous remains in that land, identical in character with those found everywhere else where this people sojourned. And Mr. Palgrave was startled to find that Arabia had its Stonehenges precisely like that which figures on the Wiltshire Downs.

The researches of French antiquaries have led to the conclusion that the men who set up these great stone monuments were those who used weapons of polished flint and chert. Precisely the same conclusion has been reached by the archÆologists of Scotland. Bronze was indeed employed, but at a later period; and then bronze and polished stone were used together.

In the tumuli of Great Britain and of Gaul, two distinct types of heads are found. These are the long and the round bullet skull. In France, before the dawn of history, there seems to have been as great a mixture of races as there is at present. It is not possible for us in England to determine the succession of peoples and civilisations as nicely as can be done in France, for we have not such deposits of the remains of successive populations superposed as they have in Perigord. Under the overhanging limestone cliffs on the VÉzÈre, men lived in succession one age on another to the present day, from the first who set foot on the soil, and by digging through these beds to the depth of forty feet, we obtain the remains of these men in their order—

Modern men.
MediÆval.
Gallo-Roman (coins).
Gauls (iron weapons).
Neolithic men	bronze. polished stone.
[Gap. This gap questioned.]
PalÆolithic men	of ivory and bone weapons.
	of delicately-worked flint blades.
	of rudely-worked flint weapons.	Moustier. Chelles.[15]

The PalÆolithic men were the great reindeer and horse hunters, and the development of their civilisation may be followed in their remains. What became of them we know not. Perhaps they migrated north after the reindeer.

The Neolithic men erected the rude stone monuments, the circles of upright stones. They were the men of Stonehenge and of Carnac. But this race was not pure. Its skulls exhibit a great mixture of character and kind, and it is probable that it took up into it other peoples subjugated on its way west and south. Perhaps it also was conquered. We cannot tell; but it seems from certain indications that it was so, and that by the metal-working race.

When the Gaels and Cymri invaded our isles, they found them peopled, and peopled by various races, and these they in turn subjugated.

We know but very little of the primitive populations of our isles and of Europe; and a good deal of what we think we know is due to guesswork based on a few observations.

As far as we can judge, the dwellers in bee-hive huts were the same as those who erected the rude stone monuments, but it does not follow that the Megalithic monument builders did not impose their customs on the race they conquered; and indeed it is possible, even probable, that a people conquering them may have adopted their religious ideas and their methods of interment.

It is curious to note how that in legend the subjugated people are supposed to live in earth mounds. No story is more common than that of a man passing a mound at night and seeing it open, and finding that merriment and drinking are going on within. Sometimes children are snatched away, and are brought up in these mounds. He who desires to have a sword of perfect temper goes to one of the mounds, taps, and bargains with the mound-dweller to make him a sword. The name now given to the race—not a pure, but a mixed one—that occupied the land before the dawn of history, is Ivernian. It was a dark-haired and sallow-complexioned race. The Kelt was fair; and if in Ireland, and in Cornwall, and in France so much dark hair and dusky skin is found, this is due to the self-assertion of the primitive race that was subjugated by the blue-eyed, fair-haired conquerors from the Black Sea and the Danube.

What was the conquered race? “What,” asks the author of “ChaldÆa,” in the “Story of the Nations,” “What is this great race which we find everywhere at the very roots of history, so that not only ancient tradition calls them ‘the oldest of men,’ but modern science more and more inclines to the same opinion? Whence came it?” And the answer Mme. Ragozin gives to the question is—that this was the yellow Turanian people which overflowed from the steppes of Northern Asia, which carried with it thence acquaintance with the metals, and through this acquaintance established itself as masters wherever it went. That may be, but before this Ivernian race arrived in the west, whatever it was, it found that man had been on the soil before it—aye, and for ages on ages—occupying caves, hunting the reindeer and the horse, ignorant of the art of the potter, and yet in some particulars his superior in intellectual power.[16]

Although the bee-hive hut may have originated with the dark-haired Ivernian metal-worker, it by no means follows that it was not in use long after, to a comparatively recent period. As we have seen, Tristan and Ysonde took refuge in one. The bee-hive hut is still in employ in the Hebrides. I will quote a most interesting account of one by Dr. A. Mitchell. “I turn now to a more remarkable form of dwelling which is still tenanted, but is just passing into complete disuse. Nearly all the specimens of it remaining in Scotland are to be found in the Lewis and Harris, or other islands of the outer Hebrides. There are probably only from twenty to thirty now in occupation, and although some old ones may yet be repaired, it is not likely that a new one will ever again be built. The newest we know of is not yet a century old. It was still occupied in 1866, and was built by the grandfather of a gentleman who died a few years ago in Liverpool.

“My first visit to one of these houses was paid in 1866, in the company of Captain Thomas. They are commonly spoken of as bee-hive houses, but their Gaelic name is bo’h or bothay. They are now only used as temporary residences or shealings by those who herd the cattle at their summer pasturage; but at a time not very remote they are believed to have been the permanent dwellings of the people.

“We had good guides, and were not long in reaching Larach Tigh Dhubhstail. As we had been led to expect, we found one of these bee-hive houses actually tenanted, and the family happened to be at home. It consisted of three young women. It was Sunday, and they had made their toilette with care at the burn, and had put on their printed calico gowns. None of them could speak English; but they were not illiterate, for one of them was reading a Gaelic Bible. They showed no alarm at our coming, but invited us into the bo’h, and hospitably treated us to milk. They were courteously dignified, neither feeling nor affecting to feel embarrassment. There was no evidence of any understanding on their part that we should experience surprise at their surroundings. I confess, however, to having shown, as well as felt, the effects of the wine of astonishment. I do not think I ever came upon a scene which more surprised me, and scarcely know where and how to begin my description of it.

“By the side of a burn which flowed through a little grassy glen, we saw two small round hive-like hillocks, not much higher than a man, joined together, and covered with grass and weeds. Out of the top of one of them a column of smoke slowly rose, and at its base there was a hole about three feet high and two feet wide, which seemed to lead into the interior of the hillock—its hollowness, and the possibility of its having a human creature within it being thus suggested. There was no one, however, actually in the bo’h, the three girls, when we came in sight, being seated on a knoll by the burnside, but it was really in the inside of these two green hillocks that they slept, and cooked their food, and carried on their work, and—dwelt, in short.

“The dwelling consisted of two apartments opening into each other. Though externally the two blocks looked round in their outline, and were in fact nearly so, internally the one apartment might be described as irregularly round, and the other as irregularly square. The rounder of the two was the larger and was the dwelling-room. The squarish and smaller one was the store-room for the milk and food. The floor space of this last was about six feet in its shorter and nine feet in its longer diameter. The greatest height of the living room—in its centre, that is—was scarcely six feet. In no part of the dairy was it possible to stand erect. The door of communication between the two rooms was so small that we could get through it only by creeping. The great thickness of the walls, six to eight feet, gave this door, or passage of communication, the look of a tunnel, and made the creeping through it very real. The creeping was only a little less real in getting through the equally tunnel-like, though somewhat wider and loftier passage which led from the open air into the first, or dwelling-room.

“At the right hand side on entering there was the fireplace. The smoke escaped at a small opening at the apex of the dome. The floor was divided into two spaces by a row of curb-stones eight or nine inches high. These served as seats, the only seats in the house; but they at the same time cut off the part of the floor on which the inmates slept, the bed, in short—the whole space behind the row of stones being covered with hay and rushes. In the part of the wall bounding the bed there were three niches or presses, in which, among other things, we observed a hair-comb and some newly-made cheeses. The walls of these bee-hive huts are built of rough, undressed stones gathered from the moor, which are of fair size, but not larger than one or two men could easily lift and put into position. The dome shape, or bee-hive form, is given by making the successive courses of stone overlap each other, till at length they approach so closely all round as to leave nothing but a small hole, which can be either closed by a large sod, or left open for the escape of smoke or the admission of light. I need scarcely say that no cement is used. The principle of the arch is ignored, and the mode of construction is that of the oldest known masonry. Though the stone walls are very thick, they are soon covered on the outside with turf, which soon becomes grassy like the land round about, and thus secures perfect wind and water tightness.”[17]

Now, this extremely interesting account shows us two things. First, that we can not safely conclude from the structure of a bee-hive hut that it belongs to a pre-historic date. We are only justified in so asserting when we find it in connection with megalithic monuments, or when the spade in exploring it reveals implements of bronze or stone. Secondly, we see how man clings to tradition, how that actually at the present day men will occupy habitations on precisely the model of those erected by the population of Great Britain ages before the Roman set foot on our land.

It may be said, and with some justice, that there is no certainty that the bee-hive hut was not a mode of construction adopted by many different races. This is true. The huts in the vineyards on the river Lot in France are of precisely the same construction. In the south of Africa the Kaffir, at the sources of the Nile the Niams, build themselves circular huts of clay and wattles. Nevertheless, when we find this sort of hut identical in structure to the smallest particular, as far apart as the Desert of Beersheba, and the dunes of Brittany, the Hebrides, the Cornish peninsula, and the Pyrenees,[18] and very generally associated with megalithic monuments, we may safely conclude that they are the remains of one primitive people, and if in later ages similar habitations have been raised, it is because that with the blood, the traditions of that race have been continued.

How striking is this passage from Dr. Geikie’s “Holy Land and the Bible.” He says, “In the Wilderness of Beersheba are bee-hive huts of stone, conjectured to be ancient native houses of the Amalekites. They are from seven to eight ft. in diameter, with a small door of two uprights and a lintel, about two ft. square. In one dwelling a flint arrowhead and some shells were found. Close by are some circles of upright stones. The whole country was at one time inhabited. Nearly every hill has ancient dwellings on the top and stone circles, also great cairns. The extraordinary resemblance, the identity in every point so struck Professor Palmer, who discovered this settlement, that in his ‘Desert of Exodus’ he engraved a Cornish bee-hive hut to show how it was a counterpart to the huts of Beersheba.”

But these bee-hive huts are themselves a reproduction in stone of the tents with which the primeval race wandered on the steppes of the Altai before ever they reached Palestine on the one hand and Europe on the other. The Nomad made his tent of skins stretched on poles. It was circular, and the smoke escaped through a hole in the top. When he ceased to ramble, he constructed his habitation on the same principle exactly as his tent, circular and domed. On the Siberian tundras and in Lapland there are still in use two sorts of huts; one, the smoke-hut, is precisely like a bee-hive habitation. It is, however, too small to allow of a fire being kept burning in the centre, and it is heated in this way—a fire is kindled and then allowed to go out. When extinct, the chimney hole at the top is closed, and the owner retires into his hut, which retains the heat for a great many hours. Sometimes, however, like the bo’h in the Hebrides, the fire is at the side, but owing to the smallness of the hovel, must be kept low. CastrÉn, in his travels among the Samojeds and Ostjaks, was sometimes obliged to spend months in one of these huts. At first he was obliged to go outside in all weathers, climb up the side of the hut and plug his chimney to keep in the warmth; but after a while he rigged up a bundle of old cloth attached to a pulley, and he was able by this means to block the opening from within, by pulling a string.

A very similar hut is still in use among the Finns, but no longer as a habitation. It is employed for bathing purposes. A fire is lighted in it, and stones are heated in the fire red hot, then plunged in a vessel of water. This generates steam, and the bather enters the bee-hive hut, shuts the door, and is parboiled in the steam. Now, the inconvenience of these bee-hive huts was obvious. Intense heat could be generated in them, but owing to their smallness, a whole family could not live in one. In the Fostbraethra Saga, an Icelandic account of transactions in the eleventh century, that comes to us in a twelfth century form, is an account of how one Thormod went to Greenland. Having committed a murder there, he took refuge with an old woman in her hut. When his foes came to seek him, she lit a fire on the hearth, and filled the hut with smoke, so that they could not see who was in it. But one man climbed on the roof and pulled the plug out of the chimney hole, whereupon the atmosphere within cleared. In time the long house with four corners to it was discovered or adopted. This was an immense advance in comfort. But, at the same time, the peculiar advantage of the bee-hive hut was not lost sight of. If human beings had been baked and boiled therein—why not their bread and their meat? They saw that a bee-hive hut was a hot-air chamber retaining the heat for an extraordinary length of time. So the next step in civilisation was to build the bee-hive hut on a smaller scale for the sake of boiling and stewing. In the year 1891 I exhumed on the edge of Trewortha Marsh, on the Cornish moors, an ancient settlement. The houses were all oblong. The principal house consisted of two great halls. The upper hall was divided by stone screens into stalls, and in front of each stall had been formerly a hearth. In each stall a family had lived, each family had enjoyed its own fire, burning on the ground. But such an open fire would not bake. The inmates had knowledge of corn, for we found a hand quern for grinding it. In order to bake, they had erected independent huts, with bee-hive ovens in the walls, identical in structure with the old bee-hive huts, and the reddened stones showed that fires had been lighted in these for baking purposes. But that was not all, we found heaps of burnt pebbles about the size of a goose-egg. These had been employed for throwing into vessels of water either to boil them, or to generate steam for baking purposes.

A common English word has completely lost its primitive signification. That word is stove. The stove is the Norse word stofa, and the German stube. It does not mean a heating apparatus, but a warm chamber.

There is a curious old book, “The Gardener’s Dictionary,” by Philip Miller, the fourth edition of which was published in 1754. He gives an account of greenhouses and conservatories as places usually unheated. “I suppose,” says he, “many people will be surprised to see me direct the making of flues under a greenhouse; but though perhaps it may happen that there will be no necessity to make any fires in them for two or three years together, yet in very hard winters they will prove extremely useful.” But when the author comes to hothouses, he describes them under the name of “stoves.”

The stove is a hot chamber, heated maybe by an oven, but we have turned the name about, and we apply it mistakenly to the heating apparatus.

In Germany the room that is heated is the stube, but the heater is the ofen. The ofen is, however, itself a reproduction in small of the hot chamber. The oven is employed to radiate outwards in heating a room; it radiates inwards when employed for baking.

The German ofen, or, as we would term it, stove, is an earthenware vessel in a room. A fire is lighted in it, till it is thoroughly heated. Then the fire is allowed to expire, and the damper is turned, effectually closing the flue. Thenceforth all the heat within and in the earthenware walls radiates into the apartment, and keeps it warm for eight or nine hours. In the ancient oven, as in the bee-hive huts at Trewortha, every precaution was adopted to retain the heat. The outside was banked up with peat, and the heat gathered within baked bread or meat.

The bee-hive oven of courses of stone was not all that could be desired. The fire acted on the granite or limestone or slate, and split or crumbled it, and when one or two stones gave way, the whole dome collapsed.

After a while a further advance was made. The bee-hive hut was constructed of earthenware, of clay baked hard, so as to resist fire for an indefinite number of years. Now in the West of England in every cottage may be seen one of these “cloam” ovens. It is in structure a bee-hive hut precisely. The old tradition hangs on, is followed from century to century and year to year, and he who looks at these ovens may think of the story they tell—of the ages unnumbered that have passed since the type was fixed by the tent of the wanderer on the Siberian steppes, of the changes that type has gone through, of the stone bee-hive hut supplanting the tent of skins, of the bee-hive hut abandoned for the house with four corners, and the old hut converted into a baking oven, and then finally of the adoption of the oven of “cloam.” In another ten or fifteen years that also will have passed away, to be replaced by the iron square oven, and then one of the links that attach us to that remote past, to that mysterious race that Mme. Ragotzin says “lies at the roots of all history,” a race which has marked its course by gigantic structures, but has left behind it no history—then, I say, one of the last links will be broken.

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