88 Stonehenge and its Barrows. 



Ralph Sheldon, Esq., dug in the middle of the circle at Rowlrich, 

 but found nothing-. Arbor-lowe, in Derbyshire, contains nothing' 

 sepulchral, nor do the Cornish circles of Boscawen-un and Botallack. 

 In 1861 some Edinburgh archaeologists made excavations within the 

 great circle known as the " Stones of Stenuis,^^ in Orkney, but could 

 not find a trace of human sepulture. The same result would probably 

 attend the examination of the area of Stonehensre.' 



^It is to be hoped that the diggirgs at Silbury Hill, and within the large 

 circle at Abuiy, will have set at re^t, for ever, the questions relating to the 

 connection of the former with the Koman road, and to the sepulchral character 

 of the latter. To the writer, when spending some days at and near Abury in 

 1856 and 1857, the course of the Roman road through the cultivated fields, 

 was, on sunny afternoons, unmistakeabK apparent. From Mr. A. C. Smith's 

 interesting account of these investigations, he extracts the following: "Al- 

 though we have found no hidden treasures, and made no fresh discoveries, the 

 result of our work was on the whole highly satisfactory to us ; for we considered 

 that we had fairly settled the question mooted by Mr. Fergusson, but which 

 neither of us ever entertained for one moment, that Avebury was a vast giave- 

 yard, and that human bones would be disinterred, if search were made. 



" We had made excavations in fourteen different spots within the area, some 

 of them of no trifling dimensions, but not one single human bone had we 

 found ; quantities of bones of the sheep, the horse, the ox, we had disinterred, 

 many of which, not far from the suiface, were of comparatively recent date : 

 glass and pottery too, near the surface told their tale of modern limes; but 

 the fragments of pottery which we brought to light from our deeper cuttings 

 were invariably of the British type. Thus we flacter ourselves that our exer- 

 tions have not been thrown away : we trust we have once for all disposed of the 

 novel theory as to the great charuel house of the ancient Britons ; while on 

 the other hand we have unmistakeably proved the site of several of the most 

 important stones long since broken up and carried away ; and we have probed 

 the great surrounding embankment to its very core, laying bare the original 

 surface, and closely examining all the materials of which it is composed. We 

 also found three stones not mentioned by recent writers. Ten yards to the east 

 of the standing stones, nearest on the left hand side of the south entrance to 

 Avebury, is a stone which is not laid down in Hoare's map. The dry summer 

 of 1864, and the heat of some part of 1865, had killed the turf over the stone, 

 and it now shows above the surface. Twenty yards in a north-westerly 

 direction from the next standing stone (' m ' in the map) another stone may be 



found under the turf, and ten yards from this again is yet another." — Wilts 



Arch and Nat. Hist. Mag., vol. x., p. 214. 



There are doubtless many stone circles within which interments have been 



found, and it may be that in these the sepulchral character was the first and only 



character attached to them by their builders ; but there are very many others in 



