242 THE RITUAL OF BARROWS AND CIRCLES. 



some obvious relation to a Cult of the Dead and to a growing 

 belief in a life to come. They might show signs of orientation, 

 to correspond with the fact that barrows for the most part are 

 oriented either by their construction or by the attitude of the 

 buried bodies that they contain. And they might possess some 

 indication of ritual uses; of assemblies, processions, and 

 circumambulation. 



" Stone circles," it would seem, supply all these requirements. 

 Apart from the significant fact that the majority of circles 

 present some indication of an entrance, it is the case that in a 

 large proportion of those that are met with on moorland, the 

 remains of a continuous wall, of the circular vallum that once 

 enclosed and united the discontinuous megaliths, actually exist. * 



It can be traced, for example, at the " Nine Ladies " in 

 Derbyshire, a circle with a central mound, and at two circles in 

 Cornwall, without central mounds, one near Kenidjak and one 

 near Mulfra Quoit. The same thing was observed by Anderson 

 who wrote in 1777 when many antiquities existed that have since 

 disappeared. He gave the following account of what he had 

 seen " in some hundreds of places." " The circle is about 

 forty-six feet in diameter. The stones that compose it are 

 usually ten or twelve feet high. The area within is smooth and 

 somewhat lower than the ground around it, and a smooth bank 

 carried quite round between the stones is still a little higher than 

 the ground about it." f 



Sometimes the ring-fence was made of megaliths placed in 

 actual contiguity, as at the Circle of Tredinek, thirty feet in 

 diameter, figured by Borlase in 1754. J 



Zennor Circle, which is seventy-two feet in diameter, con- 

 sisted of a close ring of stones, some larger and the rest " small 



* This, and other passages are quoted from a Paper by the present writer, 

 read in 1887, called a " New Theory of Stone Circles." A copy of it is in the 



Dorset Museum Library. 



f Arch. v. 246. 



| Plate XIII. fig. 1. 

 $ Plate XIII. fig. 4. 



