The Contingency Conjecture. “If a man dreamt of a great pile of
stones he would dream of such a pile as the Cheesewring”; so
writes a Victorian antiquarian of the tor which teeters on a
Granite outcrop called Stowe’s hill on Bodmin moor. I took this
photo of the tor, which is as tall as a house, whilst holidaying
in Cornwall. In the past there has been uncertainty over whether
these formations were natural or man made: “.. this wonderful
pile of stones .. but whether the work of nature or not I know
not”, writes one antiquarian. It seems, however, that this
monument is the product of the erosional effects of wind and
water after acting many thousands of years on a granite dome
that took many thousands of years to cool from a magma plume,
which in turn took many thousands of years to well up from the
mantel. As another antiquarian writes: “The Cheese-rings were
probably constructed by nature herself, in one of her whimsical
moments”. In support of this, my inspection of Stowe’s hill
revealed several of these b