68 A Descriptmi of three Barrows, Opened 



uncivilizedj and less skilled in the manufacturing arts, than their 

 neighbours on the south side of that remarkable boundary. The 

 present researches fully confirm the remark. 



No barrow yet opened in North Wilts has yielded such magnificent 

 results as those of Upton Lovely or those of the Normanton group 

 on Salisbury Plain. The pottery found is undoubtedly of a ruder 

 type, and very imperfectly burnt, and scarcely a vestige of anything 

 but pottery, bones, and stone implements, was found in any of the 

 numerous early barrows opened by Dean Merewether near Avebury 

 and Beckhampton in 1849.^ 



The barrow at Rockley, of which a diagram is given in Plate I., 

 is an early British bowl-shaped barrow, with the rather unusual 

 addition of a vallum surrounding it. It is 110 feet in diameter, and 

 about 7 feet high. It was opened by a section from east to west 

 through its centre, and it was found to be constructed principally 

 of the loose clayey surface- soil, slightly mixed with rubble-chalk 

 and flints. In the centre a cairn, 20 feet in diameter, had been 

 constructed of large sarsen stones, some of which weighed three or 

 four hundred-weight. With only one or two exceptions, these are 

 of the dense brown variety of sarsen stone : they were probably 

 gathered from the surface of the valley itself. Notable among them 

 was a block, about 18 inches square of the saccharoid variety, as 

 white and even softer than ordinary loaf-sugar.^ 



Ihree interments have been found, one primary, and two secondary. 

 About the middle of the cairn, on the level of the surrounding 

 downs, and about 2 feet apart, were placed the two urns and food- 

 cups, as shewn in the diagram, Plate I. The urn in the diagram 

 (in the centre, Plate II.) is a large funereal urn, 16 inches in height, 

 and 13 in diameter. It is very imperfectly burnt, probably dried 

 only by exposure to the sun, and then baked — rather than burnt — 

 in the ashes of the funeral pile. When found it was in such a 

 decaying condition that it was not possible to remove it except in a 



' Proceedings of Archaeological Institute, Salisbury Volume, p. 83. 

 ^ A portion of the large upright stone at Stonehenge (P 1 in Hoare's plan) is 

 of the same soft variety of sarsen. It has accordingly sufEered much at the_ 

 hands of excursionists. 



