242 HORSE-SHOES AND HORSE-SHOEING. 



of the great king there buried in the centre, very little 

 below the surface ; the bones were extremely rotten, so 

 that they crumbled them in pieces with their fingers. 

 The soil was altogether chalk, dug from the side of the 

 hill below, of which the whole barrow is made. Six 

 weeks after, I came to rescue a curiosity which they took 

 up there, an iron chain, as they called it, which I bought 

 of John Fowler, one of the workmen : it was the bridle 

 buried with the monarch, being only a solid body of rust. 

 I immersed it in a limner's drying cloth, and dried it 

 carefully, keeping it ever since very dry. It is now as 

 fair and entire as when the workmen took it up. There 

 were deer's horns, an iron knife with a bone handle, too, 

 all excessively rotten, taken up along with it.' ' Bracy 

 Clark described the bit in his 'Treatise on Bits.' 



Hoare asserts that the majority of the Wiltshire bar- 

 rows, of which this Silbury Hill was undoubtedly one, 

 were the sepulchral memorials of the Celtic and first 

 colonists of Britain ; and some may be ascribed to the 

 subsequent colony of Belgac who invaded the island. 

 Roberts^ plainly indicates that this immense cairn must 

 have been erected before the arrival of the Romans ; for 

 the Roman road which traverses this county, and which 

 passes in a tolerably direct line, when it reaches the mound 

 turns out of its course to avoid it, and in doing so cuts 

 through a large barrow in its vicinity, part of which is 

 yet standing between the avenue and the hill. It was in 

 the vicinity of this mound that these shoes were met with. 



' Goiigh. Camden's Britannia. 

 ^ Pop. Antiquities of Wales. 



