102 w Notes on Barrow-diggings. 
instances the legs were doubled up, and has led his readers to sup- 
pose that in all of them the knees were bent. Without giving 
the orientations, he has mentioned two more skeletons as having 
been laid on their left side, and two on their back. With regard 
to these various burial customs he has remarked that the early 
custom was to place the head to the north, and that at a later 
period (the iron age) when the body was laid at full dength, the 
heads were placed at random in a variety of directions. Upon 
meeting with an instance of the latter kind he says: ‘here we 
find an interment of a later era, of the same period as that before 
described on Rodmead down, when the custom of gathering up the 
legs had ceased, and when the use of iron was more generally 
adopted: for in the early tumuli, none of that metal has ever been 
found.” (Ancient Wilts, p. 174.) We are not to understand 
from this remark that with the introduction of iron the custom of 
gathering up the legs actually ceased, for we have an instance to 
the contrary in one of the interments belonging to the group 
(barrow No. 3) I have been describing, and we know that it con- 
tinued to be in use in the early Anglo-Saxon period. 
Eastward of this zroup of barrows, across the road leading from 
Collingbourne to Salisbury, in the direction of Windmill hill, there 
are two small barrows which were examined in November, 1861. 
At about one foot from the apex of one, were found a small Roman 
coin, much corroded, a piece of slate in which a hole had been 
begun to be drilled, and a fragment of Samian pottery. <A few 
fragments of coarse dark pottery were scattered about the mound, 
indicating a previous disturbance. Near to this barrow is a second, 
part of which has been removed in making a roadway. A large 
number of flints lay close under the turf, and among them were 
many fragments of two large urns (mouths downwards) of dark, 
coarse, and thick ware, which originally contained human bones. 
The urns rested on a layer, one foot thick, of large flints, and 
under tnem, in the centre of the barrow, was a circular hole dug 
in the chalk, two feet wide and two feet deep, containing a mass of 
charcoal and incinerated human bones. The bottom and sides of 
the hole were red and discoloured by fire. 

