The most visited of all West Cornwall’s dolmens, or burial mounds, Lanyon Quoit owes its popularity to its location, a short walk from a main road. The monument is thought to date from the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, and has a capstone weighing more than eighteen tons. It once stood high enough off the ground for a man on horseback to sit comfortably beneath it, but the capstone fell to the ground in the early nineteenth century, probably as a result of excavations, and was replaced by a team from the Royal Navy, who found they had to lower the height of the ‘legs’ in order to accomplish the repairs.