At Drizzlecombe there is a cairn with which is connected a row 260 feet long, with an upright stone 17 feet 9 inches high at the end of the row.
All sorts of random guesses have been made about these rows. Some have made them out to be sacred _cursi_, where races were run, but then some lines are single, some are eightfold. Others have supposed that these were the supporting stones to cattle sheds, but these stones are often not more than 2 feet 6 inches high, and the rows often run for over 600 feet.
We must, as already said, look to present usage for their interpretation, and that afforded by the practice of the Khassias of the Brahmapootra, and by the Bedouin, seems the simplest--stones set up as memorials or tributes of respect to the dead man who is buried at the head of the row.
There would seem to have been no feeling attached to the direction in which these lines run.
One singular feature is that in several cases a second row starts off from a small cairn in or close to the main row, and runs away in quite a different direction.[8]
5. The _menhir_, or tall stone, is a rude, unwrought obelisk. In some cases it is nothing other than the starting or the blocking stone of a row which has been destroyed. This is the case with that at Merrivale Bridge. But such is not always the case. There were no rows in connection with the menhirs on Devil Tor and the Whitmoor Stone.
That the upright block is a memorial to the dead can hardly be doubted; it was continued to be erected, with an inscription on it, in Romano-British times, and its modern representative is in every churchyard.
The menhirs, locally termed longstones, or langstones, must at one time have been numerous. There was a langstone near Sourton, another by Tavistock, one at Sheeps Tor, others by Modbury; these stones have disappeared and have left but their names to tell where they once stood. One on Peter Tavy Common gave its title to the moor which the Ordnance surveyors have rendered Launceston Moor. The stone is at one end of a row, and served as a waymark over the down. It had fallen, but is re-erected.
But there are still a good many remaining. The tallest is one already referred to at Drizzlecombe. Bairdown Man (_maen_ = a stone) is by Devil Tor in a singularly desolate spot. We have none comparable to the Devil's Arrows at Boroughbridge in Yorkshire--but the best have been carried away to serve as monolithic church pillars.