148 Stonehenge and its Barrows 



territory of the Belgae for interment near the place where their great 

 annual assemblies seem to have been held/^ The barrows cannot 

 be considered apart from the mysterious stony structure which 

 they surround. Sir K,. C. Hoare says: "I scarcely know how 

 we can separate the sera of the one from the other/' and Dr. 

 Thurnam, in his important work on British barrows (Archseologia, 

 vol. xliii), from which the writer proposes to make copious ex- 

 tracts, writes as follows : " That Stonehenge belongs to the same 

 epoch as the barrows by which it is surrounded might be inferred 

 from their relative situation. We might, perhaps, surmise priority 

 in the case of two small tumuli, encroached on and inclosed by the 

 vallum and ditch, which, at the distance of a hundred feet, form the 

 enceinte to the stones; one o£ which tumuli, on being excavated 

 was found to cover an interment of burnt bones. Two other barrows 

 however, at no great distance, appear to have been contemporary, or 

 at the most, of a date very slightly posterior to that of Stonehenge 

 itself. In digging down to the base of them, chippings and frag- 

 ments not merely of the sarsens were found, but likewise of the blue 

 felspathic horn-stones, foreign to Wiltshire, which assist in the for- 

 mation of this megalithic structure.'^ 



By comparison with the number of barrows on a similar area 

 around the circles of Abury, Dr. Thurnam found that those in the 

 latter district were only one hundred and six, little more than one 

 third as many as in the Stonehenge district.^ 



The barrows around Stonehenge are of different ages,' of different 



fonnd a skeleton in a hut-circle on Walton Down, near Clevedon, Somerset, at 

 a depth of from four to iive feet from the surface. A short notice of this was 

 inserted by Mr. Albert "Way, in the sixteenth vol. of the Archteological Journal, 

 p. 157. Dr. Thurnam, to whom the writer gave the skull, pronounced it to 

 be that of a young woman. 



^ " The large map of Stonehenge and its environs has an area of about six- 

 teen square miles, but the barrows comprised within do not extend over more 



than twelve In no place in the British Isles — perhaps, if we except 



the plains at old Upsala, not in Europe, — are the tumuli so numerous as around 

 Stonehenge, where they form a great necropolis." — Dr. Thurnam. 



^ By " different ages " is here meant that some appear to have been erected 

 before the Stonehenge circles ; some when they were in course of construction, 

 and others, after their completion. In no instance, however, have Roman coins 



