Manchester Memoirs, Vol. Ixvi, (1922), No. 4 3 



quote the words of Mr. O. G. S. Crawford, the Archaeology 

 Ofificer of the Ordnance Survey, whose appointment is a cause 

 of so much gratification to those interested in the history of 

 our country. Mr. Crawford, in describing, to the Royal 

 Geographical Society, his future work on the Ordnance 

 Survey, devotes a few words to Long Barrows. He says : — 

 ''A Long Barrow is a mound of earth, generally about 150 

 feet long, broader at one end, and covering the remains of 

 bodies buried there in the Neolithic Age. In regions where 

 stone was available, burial-chambers were built and the whole 

 mound surrounded by a (generally rectangular) wall of dry 

 masonry (2, 252). Mr. Crawford's inference is clear. Given 

 a supply of stone a chamber is made : when stone is absent a 

 chamber is not made. This must be put to the test. 



In the first place it can be shown, without difficulty, that, 

 in this, and every country, the available supplies of stone have 

 had little to do with the practice of the use of stone. In 

 England the megalithic monuments of the counties of Derby- 

 shire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, for instance, are confined to 

 a few areas; in the neighbourhood of the carboniferous lime- 

 stone in Derbyshire, round Whitby in Yorkshire, with a few 

 long barrows on the Yorkshire Wolds. Hundreds of square 

 miles of country are devoid of them. Where is the available 

 stone for the purpose ? A glance at a geological map will 

 show that a vast area in these counties is occupied by the 

 millstone grit formation, which is full of stone in every way 

 suitable for the construction of megalithic monuments. I will 

 offer to erect a monument far surpassing Stonehenge from 

 great blocks of stone that lie within a mile or two of Pateley 

 Bridge in Nidderdale. There are no megalithic monuments 

 within dozens of miles of this place. The same can be said 

 of any other part of this region. The great extent of the oolite 

 formation in this country is but sparsely occupied by mega- 

 lithic monuments. Again, although the granite formations of 

 Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor, and the Land's End district are full 

 of megaliths, there are none on St. Austell Moor, which is of 

 granite. Why is that? If men built megaliths in the other 

 places because they found granite, they should, on such a 

 hypothesis, have built them on St. Austell Moor, but they did 

 not. Vast stretches of this country, full of suitable stone, are 

 bereft of megaliths. Again, is one to suppose that the only 

 suitable stone for megaliths in Europe is to be found in 

 Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, Denmark, Southern 

 Sweden, North Germany, Italy, with a few scattered spots in 

 Galicia and elsewhere?' Are we asked to believe that the 



