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TORRS WARREN. 45 
This shows that a hole had been dug, in which the urn had been 
placed ; but urns appear also to have been laid on the surface of 
the ground, and a mound raised over them. There are also 
places where urns have been kept in stock, but there are no 
guiding marks to these spots. I dug for several days at a place 
on the High Torrs, five hundred yards north-west of the steading, 
where there were many fragments of urns. They had belonged 
to several types, all hand-made and ornamented, and as there were 
no burnt bones in connection with them, the place had probably 
been used as a store, and the fragments had likely belonged to 
“wasters,” accidentally broken or badly fired, as the “paste” of 
some was quite soft, and crumbled easily between the fingers. I 
found little else here but urn fragments. A hammer stone turned 
up which had been much worked with, but only at one end. I 
have seen many fragments of hand-made pottery which had 
probably been buried full of food, as, crusting the inside surfaces, 
there is a thin layer of a carbonized substance. They may, of 
course, have been used for preparing food or “‘ masking tea,” and 
had never been cleaned. On the Ayrshire sands I have also 
found places where urns had apparently been kept in store. 
Favourite places for the burial of urns have been the summits and 
sides of sand ridges and dunes. Stamps, probably made of a 
perishable material, as wood or bone, appear to have been used 
in ornamenting urns. I dug up a large part of one which had 
been ornamented by a stamp, and the ornamentation carried from 
the top of the rim all over the sides and bottom. There is a 
popular belief that these old hand-made urns, etc., were finished 
by being simply sun-dried. There never was a greater mistake. 
They have been all certainly burned, and their elegant shapes, 
when we consider that they had been hand-made, show that 
urn-making was a trade carried on by skilled workmen. The 
tempering of the clay for them had been also particularly well 
attended to, and I have found fragments which show that it had 
sometimes been mixed with grass or broken bits of quartz, etc. 
Medizval pottery, both glazed and unglazed, is not infrequently 
got, and extends on to the new ground; it has all been made on 
the wheel. Stone axes are by no means frequently found on the 
Torrs. I dug at the west end of the beach, about eight hundred 
yards west north-west of High Torrs steading, where much broken 
