PARISH OF HELPERTHORPE. 205 



number of the curious and puzzling- holes which have been so fre- 

 quently noticed before. They are clearly not graves ; for in by far 

 the greater number of instances no trace whatever of human bone 

 has been found in them ; and in those cases where any such occur, 

 they appear to be accidentally present. They have been met with 

 in the long barrows of the south-west of England ; but either they 

 do not exists or they have not been noticed^ in the Derbyshire and 

 Staffordshire barrows, so large a number of which are described in 

 Mr. Bateman's two volumes. It is open to surmise that they may 

 have been intended to serve the same purpose which the vessels of 

 pottery buried with unburnt and (in some cases) with burnt bodies 

 are supposed to have fulfilled, that, namely, of holding provisions 

 for the use of the buried person. I am not able to say the supposi- 

 tion appears to me a very plausible one ; but I am equally unable 

 to offer any conjecture of a more reasonable nature or supported by 

 any tangible evidence. 



Parish of Helperthorpe. Orel. Map. xciv. n.w. 



XLIX. The barrow" I next proceed to describe was situated on the 

 south bank of a small valley which runs parallel with the great 

 wold valley, and about half a mile to the south of it. Although there 

 are some barrows at no ver}" great distance from it, this one stood quite 

 alone. It was 54 ft. in diameter, 1^ ft. high, and was made of earth 

 and some chalk. There w^ere several interments in it, of both burnt 

 and unburnt bodies, and it had been disturbed in early times, 

 probably not long after its original construction, with the object of 

 inserting secondary interments. All the burials had been made in 

 a line running east-south-east by west-north-west through the 

 centre of the mound. Eighteen feet east-south-east from the centre 

 were the remains of a burnt body, or possibly of more than one 

 body, which had been burnt on the spot. Mixed chalk and flint 

 had been laid upon the bones and then fired, the whole by this process 

 having become compacted into a substance nearly as hard as stone, 

 and presenting many features in common with those of the calcined 

 chalk and flint in the long barrow on Willerby Wold and in others 

 described in this volume. Indeed it is quite possible that the 

 original interments may have belonged to the same period as that 

 when it was the custom to bury after this fashion and under long 

 mounds. This may indeed, in the first instance, have been a 



