in close, craggy
lumps; flung about hither and thither, as if in reckless sport, by the
hands of giants. Above the whole, rose the weird fantastic form of the
Cheese-Wring, the wildest and most wondrous of all the wild and wondrous
structures in the rock architecture of the scene.

If a man dreamt of a great pile of stones in a nightmare, he would dream
of such a pile as the Cheese-Wring. All the heaviest and largest of the
seven thick slabs of which it is composed are at the top; all the
lightest and smallest at the bottom. It rises perpendicularly to a
height of thirty-two feet, without lateral support of any kind. The
fifth and sixth rocks are of immense size and thickness, and overhang
fearfully, all round, the four lower rocks which support them. All are
perfectly irregular; the projections of one do not fit into the
interstices of another; they are heaped up loosely in their
extraordinary top-heavy form, on slanting ground half-way down a steep
hill. Look at them from whatever point you choose, there is still all
that is heaviest, largest, strongest, at the summit, and all that is
lightest, smallest, weakest, at the base. When you first see the
Cheese-Wring, you instinctively shrink from walking under it. Beholding
the tons on tons of stone balanced to a hair's breadth on the mere
fragments beneath, you think that with a pole in your hand, with one
push against the top rocks, you could hurl down the hill in an instant a
pile which has stood for centuries, unshaken by the fiercest hurricane
that ever blew, rushing from the great void of an ocean over the naked
surface of a moor.

Of course, theories advanced by learned men are not wanting to explain
such a phenomenon as the Cheese-Wring. Certain antiquaries have
undertaken to solve this curious problem of Nature in a very off-hand
manner, by asserting that the rocks were heaped up as they now appear,
by the Druids, with the intention of astonishing their contemporaries
and all posterity by a striking exhibition of their architectural skill.
(If any of these antiquarian gentlemen be still living, I would not
recommend them to attempt a practical illustration of their theory by
building miniature Cheese-Wrings out of the contents of their
coal-scuttles!) The second explanation of the extraordinary position of
the rocks is a geological explanation, and is apparently the true one.
It is assumed on this latter hypothesis, that the Cheese-Wring, and all
the adjacent ma