PARISH OF NETHER SWELL. 445 



form of the skull, and the apparent unity of the people who occupied 

 the country at the time of the erection of these long barrows^ was 

 of a very conclusive kind. 



The round barrows, which as a rule occupy the prominent natural 

 position usually characterising sepulchral structures, are pretty 

 generally dispersed throughout all the high land of the district. 

 In consequence of their having been made of stone, they have 

 suffered much at the hands of those who built the walls of the 

 fields in which they are found, as also from having had the larger 

 stones taken out of them to remove obstructions to the plough, and 

 thus most of the secondary interments, placed in them after the 

 first throwing up of the mound, have disappeared. It was only in 

 one case (which indeed was the single undisturbed barrow I saw) 

 that the mound was intact, and in consequence a valuable discovery 

 of two secondary burials was made. 



The number of round barrows subjected to examination was 

 only small, and therefore it would be unsafe to base any certain 

 conclusions upon evidence so little abundant. At the same time it 

 is probable that they form a substantially correct index of the 

 whole number, and we may fairly infer from their contents that the 

 prevailing practice as regards the deposition of the dead was 

 burial after cremation, and that here, as in other places, the body 

 so treated was sometimes placed in an urn, at other times was laid 

 in the ground without any such protection, and that in some 

 instances an implement was associated with the interment. 



Parish of Nether Swell. Ord. Maj). xliv. n.e. 



In the parish of Nether Swell, on a piece of ground called 

 the Cow Com,mon, and which until within the last twenty 

 years was unbroken pasture-land, nine barrows are still re- 

 maining, one of them being a long barrow ; of these I opened 

 five. They are placed close together, four of them in fact over- 

 lapping each other, so as to give the impression at first sight that 

 the four mounds were really one and formed a long barrow. 

 A more careful examination convinced me that they were four 

 separate barrows, which subsequently proved to be the case. I have 

 not before met with an instance where a series of barrows impinged 

 in this way one upon another. They were placed in a direction 

 north-east and south-west, and measured from end to end 152 ft., 



