536 LONG BARROWS. 



as described by Mr. Joseph Anderson, as well as in the South- 

 west of England, and found to contain there interments similarly 

 arranged, and pottery and implements of a similar type and rude-, 

 ness, to those which we have found here. The peculiarity of the 

 form of these barrows suggests to us that some idea was at one 

 time or other symbolised by it; or by some form like to it, of which 

 the one with which we are familiar may be only a ' survival ' in a 

 comparatively rudimentary state. As to what that idea may have 

 been I have no suggestion to offer. A superstition, even when 

 new, embodies itself often in a grotesque representation ; and the 

 meaning of this embodiment, which may not have been very directly 

 evident even to contemporaries not acquainted with its history, 

 may, it will be easily understood, soon become wholly undecipher- 

 able in after ages. This Upper Swell Barrow, however, differs from 

 the other horned cairns in Caithness, Wiltshire, and Gloucester- 

 shire, in having its grave sunk below the surface of the natural 

 ground, instead of being represented by a chamber with upright 

 slabs for its walls, and placed on the surface and defended by the 

 piling of stones round it. A few slabs appear to have been set on 

 edge on either side of the passages or galleries leading to or serving 

 to indicate the way into the place of burial from the outside ; but 

 the grave itself was sunk into the ground, and, as the breakages 

 in some of the bones even of the perfect skeleton show, the bodies 

 were only very imperfectly protected from the pressure of the rubble 

 in which we found them embedded, even when first put into the 

 grave. The idea therefore of making the house for the dead as 

 like as it might be to the house for the living, the idea which 

 appears as shown by Professor Nilsson ^ to have lain at the founda- 

 tion of the erection of chambered barrows, was not acted upon 

 when this barrow was formed-. But there is no doubt that it 



^ Prim. Inliab. Scandina\'ia, chap. iv. ed. Lubbock. 



^ As in the horned long cairns of Caithness, and as in the other unchambered non- 

 cremation long barrows examined in England, so in this barrow we have to note the 

 absence of any of that, whether thong-, cord-, or finger-nail patterned pottei-y which has 

 been fomid in the horned short cairns of Caithness, in several chambered long baiTOWs 

 in England, and by myself in one cremation long barrow at Market Weighton in the 

 East Riding of Yorkshire. The absence of patterned pottery from the horned long 

 cairns of the north of Scotland may, as these cairns are probably earlier in date than 

 the shorter ones wdth the same type of ground-plan, seem something of an argument 

 for considering the non-chambered English long barrows which, like this one, are 

 similarly destitute of such ornamented ware to be similarly earlier in date than the 

 chambered baiTows M'hich possess it. But it must be observed, firstly, that if ante- 

 riority in date would account for this baiTow's having no chamber, whilst the barrow 

 ccxxxii, close by, had a large one, it will not explain its ha\ing its interments in a 



