174 Stonehenge and its Barrows. 



Two long' narrow stones, carefully formed and polished all over, and 

 remarkable for their tenuity, being 4| inches long, 2>\ inch hroad, 

 and scarcely more than a \ inch thick, flat on one side, and rounded 

 on the other, were found by Sir Richard Hoare in barrow No. 5. 

 He describes them as " two pieces of a dark colom-ed slaty kind of 

 stone, lying parallel with each other, which are eng'raved in 'Tumuli,' 

 jDlate xiv/' Dr. Thurnam obtained an object of this sort, of fine 

 micaceous sandstone, precisely agreeing' with the stone of the large 

 flat slab in the centre of Stonehenge, from a barrow on the plain 

 (No. 170) about a mile from the stones. (See note at page 93.) 



Dr. Thurnam considered that some of the pebbles and stones 

 found in the tumuli may have been preserved for their rarity and 

 beauty, and others as amulets or fetishes. " It is not possible,'^ he 

 says, " to decide under which of these categories we must place 

 ' the kidney-formed pebble of the sardonyx kind,' of a sea-green 

 colour, curiously striated and spotted, or the ' small red pebble,' 

 found, the one with a burnt, and the other with an unburnt body." ^ 



In the following table the implements and other objects of bone 

 obtained during Sir Richard Hoare's excavations are enumerated, 

 according as they were found with burnt or unburnt bodies : — 



1 " Ancient "Wilts," i., 165, 183, pi. xxii. A bead of stone, neatly grooved 

 round the edges, -s^as found in one of the Barrows at Lake. (lb. i., 211., pi. 

 XXX., tig. 7.) A beautifully-veined stone, polished and perforated, from a burnt 

 interment at Winterbourne Stoke (figured Archseologia, 43, p. 431), may, as 

 Hoare suggests, have been worn " suspended as an amulet." Fossils were also 

 prized; as for instance what Hoare calls " a pair of petrified cockle-shells " 

 found with bronze and ivory relics in a barrow at "Winterbourn Stoke (No. 25,) 

 but which, one being still preserved at Stourhead, we know were Brachiopods, 

 or lamp-shells {Terebrattila or Rhtjnconella,) several species of which occur in 

 the Wiltshire strata. In the barrow at Upton Lovel, at the legs of the larger 

 skeleton, with several perforated boars's tusks, and bone and stone implements, 

 were, " a handful of small pebbles of different colours, several not to be found 

 in the neighbourhood," and as many as five setites, or eagle-stones, broken in two 

 and forming a rude kind of Cup. Mr. Cunnington, who opened this banow in 

 1801, was much puzzled as to the use of these stones, which however were 

 amulets of great reputed virtue. The analogy, such as it is, between a hollovir 

 stone, " in a manner pregnant, having another stone within, as if in its womb," 

 led to the notion of its having a wonderful power of retarding or accelerating 

 delivery. Directions for its use are given by Pliny, and it retained its reputation 

 as late as the last century, when it had still a place in the London Dispensatory. 



