OGBURY BARROWS 293 



goes : and I have little doubt that from ten to twenty 

 thousand years have passed since the short, squat chieftain 

 aforesaid was first committed to his final resting-place in 

 Ogbury Long Barrow. Two years since, we local archteo- 

 logists — 7iot in becoming prints this time — opened the 

 barrow to see what was inside it. We found, as we ex- 

 pected, the ' stone vault ' of the popular tradition, proving 

 conclusively that some faint memory of the original inter- 

 ment had clung for all those long years around the grassy 

 pile of that ancient tumulus. Its centre, in fact, was 

 occupied by a sepulchral chamber built of big Sarsen 

 stones from the surrounding hillsides ; and in the midst of 

 the house of death thus rudely constructed lay the moulder- 

 ing skeleton of its original possessor — an old prehistoric 

 Mongoloid chieftain. When I stood for the first moment 

 within that primaeval palace of the dead, never before 

 entered by living man for a hundred centuries, I felt, I 

 must own, something like a burglar, something like a body- 

 snatcher, something like a resurrection man, but most of 

 all like a happy archfeologist. 



The big stone hut in which we found ourselves was, in 

 fact, a buried cromlech, covered all over (until we opened 

 it) by the earth of the barrow. Almost every cromlech, 

 wherever found, was once, I believe, the central chamber 

 of just such a long barrow : but in some instances wind 

 and rain have beaten down and washed away the sur- 

 rounding earth (and then we call it a ' Druidical monu- 

 ment ' ), while in others the mound still encloses its 

 original deposit (and then we call it merely a prehistoric 

 tumulus). As a matter of fact, even the Druids themselves 

 are quite modern and common-place personages compared 

 with the short, squat chieftains of the long barrows. For 

 all the indications we found in the long barrow at Ogbury 

 (as in many others we had opened elsewhere) led us at 



