EARLY MAN 



of the hill-side. 1 The rock itself reveals no trace of human handiwork ; 

 but long standing custom seems to connect the Hemlock Stone with 

 those ancient days in which the miracle of fire was still celebrated. The 

 use of lighting the sacred fire seems to have continued down to the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century. This lighting took place on 

 Beltane eve each year upon the top of the Hemlock Stone, according to 

 Dr. Timothy Spencer Hall, and old people in his young days could 

 remember and describe the celebration.* 



At Blidworth in a hollow to the west of the village are some 

 masses of Bunter conglomerate, which stand out above the level of the 

 fields. They remind us of the Hemlock Stone, and like it, are connected 

 by tradition with the pre-Roman past, under the name of Druid Stones. 

 The largest of them rests upon a knob of rock which juts a little above 

 the soil ; it has been hollowed from the western side for a distance of 

 about six feet into the interior of the mass. The hollow is pierced 

 through at the back in such a way that, it is said, the aperture exactly 

 faces the sun on the morning of Midsummer Day. Thus we are again 

 pointed, as in the Beltane usage on Stapleford Hill, to rites in which 

 reverence for the sun played a leading part. The hole through the 

 largest mass at Blidworth is to be compared with the numerous holed 

 stones which have been recorded in many quarters. And doubtless the 

 men who hollowed out the western side of Blidworth Stone made a 

 practice of passing either human beings or their possessions through the 

 narrow opening at the back, but with what purpose it is now impossible 

 to say. 3 



THE BRONZE AGE 



The use of metals was brought to these islands by the advanced 

 guard of the great Indo-European invasion, which, spreading from the 

 east of the European continent, pressed westward and southward, driving 

 before it the men who were already settled. The Celts, with their weapons 

 of bronze, expelled or subdued to themselves the darker neolithic 

 inhabitants of England, leaving them to take refuge in the extreme 

 west, in Cornwall, Cumberland, and Wales. Compared with their 

 enemies, the Celts were fair-haired, ruddy and tall, differing very little 

 from the Germans and Anglo-Saxons. Huxley indeed affirms that the 

 people termed Gauls, and those called Germans by the Romans, did not 

 differ in any important character. 4 It is impossible to say with anything 

 like precision by how long an interval the coming of the Celts preceded 

 the Christian era. Probably it was by a period of not less than a 

 thousand years. Since the Celts formed one of the earliest offshoots from 

 the Aryan stock, they displayed a more primitive form of constitution 

 than their brethren who emigrated at a later period. Each tribe, or 

 rather each local settlement, formed a political unit which was very 



1 This is the opinion of Prof. J. W. Carr. 



' Old Nottinghamshire, ed. by J. P. Briscoe, p. 51 ; Notts, and Derb. Notes and Queries, \, 76, 100. 

 * Baring-Gould, Strange Survivals, 268 ; Notts, and Derb. Notes and Queries, ii, 1 16 ; iii, 88. 

 4 Man's Place in Nature, 257. 



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