Mincamber, Main-Amber or Ambrose's Stone

MINCAMBER, MAIN-AMBER OR AMBROSE'S STONE.

MIGHTY Logan Stone was poised and blessed by Ambrose Merlin, not far from Penzance. "So great," says Drayton, in his "Polyalbion," "that many men's united strength cannot remove it, yet with one finger you may wag it."

Merlin proclaimed that this stone should stand until England had no king; and Scawen tells us--

"Here, too, we may add what wrong another sort of strangers have done to us, especially in the civil wars, and in particular by the destroying of Mincamber, a famous monument, being a rock of infinite weight, which, as a burden, was laid upon other great stones, and yet so equally thereon poised up by nature only, that a little child could instantly move it, but no one man, or many, remove it. This natural monument all travellers that came that way desired to behold; but in the time of Oliver's usurpation, when all monumental things became despicable, one Shrubsall, one of Oliver's heroes, then Governor of Pendennes, by labour and much ado, caused to be undermined and thrown down, to the great grief of the country, but to his own great glory, as he thought; doing it, as he said, with a small cane in his hand. I myself have heard him to boast of this act, being a prisoner under him." [a]

So was Merlin's prophecy fulfilled.

[a] "Ambers or Main Ambers, which signify anointed or consecrated stones."--C. S Gilbert, Historical Survey. See also Scawen's "Dissertation on the Cornish Langoage," Stukeley's" Stonehenge," and Jabez Allie's "Worcestershire." Appendiz O, Ambrosiae Petrae.