60 Thomas Brown, Esq., on the Ancient 



ruined, merely by cutting down those which formed a barrier 

 against the west wind. These trees covered a hill whose top 

 was about 800 feet above the level of the sea. 



It is rather a remarkable circumstance, and we cannot refrain 

 from attaching importance to it, that within 300 yards of the 

 place where the large oak and other smaller ones were covered 

 by the moss, two small deposits of silver pennies, in"excellent pre- 

 servation, were discovered ; one of these on the south side, about 

 twenty years ago> and the other on the north, within these few 

 years. 



A few of these coins were acquired, immediately after they 

 were found, by my predecessor in the country, and since that I 

 have been able to procure a few more from farmers in the neigh- 

 bourhood. I have now above twenty in my possession. These 

 are all silver pennies, either of Edward I. or of his unfortunate 

 son Edward II. There is one exception in a coin of Alexander 

 III. of Scotland. As Edward- II. was murdered in 1327, and 

 as no coins of a later reign were found, it becomes most pro- 

 bable that these coins were deposited [during the reign of 

 Edward II, soon before the battle of Bannockburn, which was 

 fought in 1314. 



I have understood that the remainder of the coins which were 

 found in these situations, were exactly similar in appearance to 

 those in my possession. Almost the whole of these are in such 

 good preservation, they are in general so sharp in the impres- 

 sion, and of course they have been so little worn or used, that 

 we may be allowed to conjecture they had in part heen recently 

 issued from the mint. It is by no means likely that so many 

 fresh English coins, almost without any mixture of Scotch ones, 

 should have been in the possession of the poor and half naked 

 natives of Scotland, so far removed from the towns where they 

 had been coined. I am inclined to conjecture, that these had 

 been deposited by the English officers or soldiers during the des- 

 tructive and doubtful skirmishes of those times, and that they 

 had been hid soon after they had been acquired as pay. As the 

 English had but little footing in Scotland after the decisive 

 battle of Bannockburn, it is likely, as we have said, that these 

 coins were deposited previous to this event. 



It is perhaps not out of place to mention here, that the coun- 



