CHAP, xii.] BURIAL CUSTOMS. 433 



age. The name of the cairn is Bryn - yr - Ellyllon, 

 goblin or fairy hill. The place was supposed to be 

 haunted, and before the discovery was made a spectre 

 was said to have been seen to enter the cairn clad in 

 golden armour. This superstition is merely a survival 

 of the idea so universal among the cairn-builders, in 

 all ages and all countries, that the tomb was the home 

 of the spirit, whence it issued into the upper world. 



The practice of burying the dead at full length was 

 first known in Britain in the Prehistoric Iron age, but 

 it did not supersede cremation. The ashes of the dead 

 were interred in megalithic tombs, sometimes of con- 

 siderable magnitude, sometimes enclosed in a pyramidal 

 mound or cairn. A magnificent group of these is to be 

 seen on the banks of the Boyne near Drogheda, con- 

 sisting of seventeen large mounds, of which the most 

 important is that of New Grange. 1 It consists of a 

 cruciform sepulchral building, 89 feet long, with tran- 

 septs 21 feet from end to end, made of large blocks of 

 stone, encased in a truncated cairn 70 feet high, 310 

 feet in diameter, and surrounded by a circle of large up- 

 right stones. The platform at the topis 120 feet across. 

 At the point of the intersection of the transepts with the 

 long passage, the roof rises into a conical dome 20 feet 

 high. In each of the three chambers, forming the head 

 and arms of the cross, was a shallow stone basin from 

 3 to 3 feet long, and from 6 to 9 inches deep. These 

 stone basins have been proved, by Mr. Eugene Conwell's 

 discoveries at Lough Crew, 2 to have contained the ashes 

 of the dead. The surface of the stones in the chambers 



1 Fergusson, Rude Stone Monuments, p. 200 et seq. Wilde, The Boyne 

 and the Blackwater, 1849, p. 188. 



2 Proceed. B. I. Acad. SS. I., No. 6, p. 72. 



2 F 



