CINERARY URNS AND INCENSE CUPS, STANTON MOOR. 49 



1847. — Labourers cutting a drain found three urns, apparently 

 together, the largest inverted over the burnt bones. Their ashy 

 contents contained a bone and bronze pin, flint fragments, and a 

 vitrified pebble. 



Stanton Moor and the neighbouring one of Hartle are very 

 rich in remains of antiquity and weird-looking natural assemblages 

 of rocks that the older antiquaries imagined, or tried to imagine, 

 to be "curious groups of Druidical monuments." But it is more 

 to our interest for the present to note that all the pre-historic 

 interments hitherto found in this region, with one doubtful 

 exception, have been of the cremation variety. A similar state of 

 things obtains for Eyam Moor, and the district immediately north 

 of it — Abney and Offerton Moors, and right away to the borders 

 of Yorkshire. Elsewhere in the Peak and the adjacent parts of 

 Staffordshire, burnt and unburnt interments are more or less 

 intermixed, but everywhere the latter are in the majority. This 

 certainly looks as though a cremation-practising people long held 

 the upper valley of the Derwent and its neighbouring country. 

 These burnt burials are by no means all inurned ; on the contrary, 

 they constitute only about thirty per cent., or some seventy, at 

 least, instances. But in the Stanton and Eyam districts they 

 have a much larger proportion. 



The following burials of this class that have been found on 

 Stanton Moor are taken from Bateman's " Vestiges " and "Ten 

 Years' Diggings " : — 



1852. — Mr. Bateman found within a small circle the remains 

 of three urns and as many cups. 



" Incense cups" are rarely associated in the Peak region 

 with other than inurned interments, and with these they are only 

 occasionally found. Amongst the seventy inurned interments 

 just alluded to, only thirteen " incense cups " (including the two 

 recently found on Stanton Moor) have been recorded ; and of 

 these, no less than seven have occurred on this moor, and two 

 in the immediate neighbourhood. Is it not clear, then, that the 

 ancient dwellers of Stanton were not only pronounced crema- 

 tionists, but attached some mystic significance to the number 

 5 



