A fogou is an underground chamber. There are several of them here in Cornwall, and also in Brittany. At some point in the distant past, there was a drive among these people to claw slopes into the ground, and to dig out rooms beneath the grass.
Nobody knows why. Some said they were storage areas, but nobody living through a Cornish winter, or even a Cornish spring, can believe that. The slopes become mudslides and the chambers fill with rainwater. Some said they were hiding places, where villagers could shelter from raiders. But, with only one entrance point, fogous would surely become traps and kill-boxes.
Fogous share one property. The opposite end of the chamber from the entrance tunnel is a flat wall. Hence its other proposed possible use: a ritual space. In many mythologies from the west of the British Isles, the Other World, Heaven, Annwn, the place of gods and the dead, was underground.
The wall was a door, if you could learn to see it. And beyond it was the Other World. In times past, he believed, people came down into a fogou to commune, and to travel.
He knew someone had travelled. He lived alone now because someone had travelled.
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