Carn Euny, Cornwall: The baffling ruin with a tunnel dating back to the Iron Age

Annie Elwes investigates the ruins of Carn Euny.

Carn Euny's ancient village near Sancreed, West Cornwall.
Carn Euny's ancient village near Sancreed, West Cornwall.
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

This is a strange place, particularly when viewed from the air, because we’re so used to seeing ruins in squares or rectangles, but ancient man had no such love of angles.

Higgledy-piggledy foundations of 2nd- to 4th-century stone huts can be seen at Carn Euny, near Sancreed on the Penwith peninsula, abandoned in the late-Roman period.

Carn Euny pictured from the air by a Historic England Staff Photographer.

The settlement boasts an Iron Age underground tunnel, 65ft long, called a ‘fogou’ and particular to far-west Cornwall.

Above all, Carn Euny is a mystery. No one knows what it was for, but the care that went into its construction reveals its importance.

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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.