270 EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. vin. 



posed of upright posts and horizontal sleepers, morticed 

 at the angles, the end of each upright post being inserted 

 into the lower sleeper of the frame and fastened by a 

 large block of wood or forelock." 1 The mortices were 

 roughly made with a blunt instrument, the wood being 

 bruised rather than cut ; and, oddly enough, a stone celt 

 found in the house (like Fig. 99), according to Captain 

 Mudge, corresponded exactly with the cuts of the tool 

 used in forming the mortices and grooves. The logs had 

 been cut with a larger instrument, also of stone. The 

 house consisted of two stories, one over the other, each 

 four feet high. It stood upon a stratum of bog fifteen feet 

 deep, which had been covered by a layer of hazel bushes, 

 and that by a layer of fine sand, before the building had 

 been begun. On the ground-floor, besides the stone axe 

 above mentioned, there was a grindstone hollowed in 

 the centre by rubbing. " A paved causeway, resting 

 upon a foundation of hazel bushes and birchwood," led 

 to the remains of a fireplace composed of slabs of free- 

 stone, at fourteen yards' distance from the house, on which 

 was a quantity of ashes. It appeared to have been 

 surrounded by a staked enclosure. This house and the 

 surrounding woodland growth of bog-willow, ash, and 

 oak, lay buried under a depth of twenty-three feet of 

 peat, the roof of the house being fourteen feet below the 

 surface of the bog. It is the only example of a wooden 

 cabin of the Neolithic age which is on record ; and it 

 may be looked upon as a type of one of the forms of 

 habitation where timber was abundant, and where stone 

 was not at hand for building circular or beehive huts, 

 like the Scotch burghs. The huts were probably more 



1 Sir W. Wilde, Cat. of Antiquities in the Museum of the Eoyal Irish 

 Academy, p. 235. 



