The Great Goddess of Clodgy Moor

The Great Goddess of Clodgy Moor is a brightly coloured and scratched stone found and named by field walker and amateur archaeologist Graham Hill sometime in April 2005 in a ploughed field near Clodgy Moor in west Cornwall. The stone was considered worthy of drawing and included with drawings of humanly worked flints sent to The Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, Cornwall.
In 2011 The Clodgy Moor Project, a multi-agency funded project recorded the flint tools, Neolithic pottery and greenstone axe finishing factory found at the site in the Portable Antiquities Scheme database. An account of the findings was published in 2013. The object known by its catalogue number of '190.6' was returned without acquisition by the Royal Cornwall Museum and without comment. Subsequent research on another object found on the site and the discovery of Neolithic figurines at the Links of Noltland in 2009-12 lead Hill to realize in February 2014 that stone object 190.6 was more than a scratched stone and actually a highly detailed Neolithic idol.On inspection in sunlight, with a hand lens many symbols are visible which can be attributed to a much wider context than even the UK. Checker-board symbols like those found on the Later Neolithic Woodcock Corner slate disc found by an excavation at Truro in 2012 are visible, as is a butterfly or double axe seen on mainland European artifacts. as well as in Scotland
Similarity between the Clodgy Moor idol and the decorated stone found in a Neolithic house at Links of Noltland in 2009 is also notable.
The idol has a yellow head which has two carved eyes and a beak which may have represented that of an owl.
The ground white coloured body has natural red jasper inclusions, which may have been chosen to look like arms and have been accentuated by false relief carving. The double axe symbol therefore marks the position of the navel and below is a prominent and apparently red stained pubic triangle with a cut for the vulva. These symbols together may be interpreted as aspects of nature with the owl eating the dead, the arms nurturing plants, animals and humans and below, the creation of new life.
The Great Goddess of Clodgy Moor was published in the Cornish interest magazine Meyn Mamvro in 2014 and is the subject of further study at Truro College, following the successful mapping of the object using a microscope photograph montage technique.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu