f the island, which, within
the memory of Mr. Heaven, the last owner of the island, was a true
logan-stone, and could be rocked with the hands, but has now slipped
from its socket. But the whole question of these logan-stones is
controversial, some claiming them as relics of antiquity of whose use
and meaning we are ignorant, and others as the chance product of the
natural forces of rain and weather.

The same also may be said of the "rock-basins," of which a very perfect
example may be found in the Punchbowl Valley, being a granite basin of
four feet in diameter, with a uniform thickness of six inches, with
both the concave and convex surfaces segments of a perfect sphere.
Later opinion inclines to a human, and not a chance, origin for these
interesting phenomena.

But, leaving the dim and still conjectural paths of archaeology, let us
turn to the history of Lundy. Here again we are confronted with facts
which a conscientious historian would hesitate to assert, save as
legend. For this singular land, where the King's writ does not run,
which is not assimilated even yet to municipal government, was for
centuries, even down to the eighteenth century, a robber stronghold,
from which, as from those castles on the Rhine, and still earlier and
more powerful castles of the Aegean lords, built athwart the peninsulas
of the trade-routes, the garrison swooped maraudering upon the peaceful
occupations of unprotected folk.

Lundy is supposed, not upon very certain authority, to have been called
"Herculea" in Roman times; and there is no record, nor even tradition,
of how it came by its present name, only a vague conjecture of a
Scandinavian origin, of which I have already spoken. But there are
evidences of a much earlier occupation than the Roman--indeed, so far
as I know, there have been no Roman remains found yet upon the
island--and it is no unlikely supposition that the great skeleton of
the Giant's Grave was some such feared and piratical chieftain as the
first recorded lord of the island, the fierce de Marisco. These
Mariscos were a branch of the great family of Montmorency, and they
were ever a thorn in the side of their liege-lord, whether in England,
Ireland, or Lundy. They must have owned Lundy since the days of the
Norman Conquest, if they had not seized it before; for the great castle
Marisco, built upon the extreme verge of the cliffs, commanding the bay
and the landing-place, and overlooking in a wide sweep