PARISH OF ROTHBURY. 431 



Like the cairns at Harbottle and those on Holystone Common, 

 these four on Cartington Fell and at Burgh Hill were quite barren 

 of implements, weapons, or ornaments ; but these last, unlike the 

 former, had no vessels of pottery associated with the interments. 

 I should not however, from this circumstance, be inclined either to 

 attribute them to an earlier period than other mounds which have 

 proved more prolific in articles usually found accompanying- burials, 

 or to suppose that they were the sepulchral places of poorer persons. 

 It is so common to find even in the same barrow, as well as in the 

 same group of barrows, one body with which articles of use or 

 ornament have been associated, whilst the rest have had nothing at 

 all buried with them — the other features of the several interments 

 being entirely identical — that I cannot attempt to explain the 

 circumstance by a difference alone of time or of social condition. 



Fig. 160. i. 



It may be mentioned that burials have been met with in the 

 locality where the last-described barrows are situated in which 

 various objects were found accompanying the interments. Thus, at 

 Great Tosson, which is about two miles from Lordenshaws, four 

 cists were discovered excavated in the limestone rock, there being 

 no present appearance of any mound having covered the cists \ In 

 one of them was the body of probably a woman, the cist containing 

 in addition a jet button [fig. 160] and a 'food vessel^ [fig. 161]. 

 Another held a body, with a jet button similar to, though rather 

 smaller than, the last-mentioned one. There was also in this cist a 

 « food vessel,' in shape like fig. 68 ; 8| in. high, 7| in. wide at the 

 mouth, and 3^ in. at the bottom ; it is ornamented on the inside of 



* The skull from tlie first of these cists at Great Tosson and several of the 

 associated articles are engraved in Crania Britannica, pi. 54, where is also a full 

 account of the whole discovery. 



