292 OGBURY BAKBOWS 



little children of Ogbury village have noticed its close 

 resemblance of shape and outline to the grassy hillocks in 

 their own churchyard, and whisper to one another when 

 they play upon its summit that a great giant in golden 

 armour lies buried in a stone vault underneath. But if 

 only they knew the real truth, they would say instead that 

 that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of 

 a short, squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature 

 to the Lapps and Finns, and about as much unlike a giant 

 as human nature could easily manage. It maybe regarded 

 as a general truth of history that the greatest men don't 

 by any means always get the biggest monument. 



The archasologists in becoming prints who went with 

 us to the top of Ogbury Barrows sagaciously surmised 

 (with demonstrative parasol) that ' these mounds must 

 have been made a very long time ago, indeed.' So in fact 

 they were : but though they stand now so close together, 

 and look so much like sisters and contemporaries, one is 

 ages older than the other, and was already green and 

 grass-grown with immemorial antiquity when the fresh 

 earth of its neighbour tumulus was first thrown up by its 

 side, above the buried urn of some long-forgotten Celtic 

 warrior. Let us begin by considering the oldest first, and 

 then pass on to its younger sister. 



Ogbury Long Barrow is a very ancient monument in- 

 deed. Not, to be sure, one quarter so ancient as the days 

 of the extremely old master who carved the mammoth on 

 the fragments of his own tusk in the caves of the Dordogne, 

 and concerning whom I have indited a discourse in an earlier 

 portion of this volume : compared with that very antique 

 personage, our long barrow on Ogbury hill- top may in fact 

 be looked upon as almost modern. Still, when one isn't 

 talking in geological language, ten or twenty thousand 

 years may be fairly considered a very long time as time 



