TIDESWELL AND TIDESLOW. 69 



Anyone who is practically acquainted with the contents of 

 prehistoric tumuli, will at once recognise from this descrip- 

 tion that the interment belonged to the early Neolithic period, 

 thus graphically described by the greatest living authority on 

 the subject, Professor Boyd Dawkins, in his Early Man in 

 Britain-: "The Neolithic tribes in Britain buried their dead 

 sometimes in caves which had previously been used by them 

 for dwellings, and sometimes in chambered tombs, which pro- 

 bably represent the huts of the living. Each of these was 

 generally used as a vault common to the family or tribe, and 

 contained skeletons of all ages. The interments are shown to 

 have been successive and not simultaneous, from the bones 

 being in various stages of decay, as well as from the fact that 

 the bodies could not have been crowded together in the space 

 in which the skeletons are found. . . . The more important 

 contain a stone chamber built of slabs of stone set on edge, 

 and very frequently with a narrow passage leading into it, which 

 was also used for interments after the chamber was filled " 

 (284). 



Mr. Bateman examined several tumuli of this class on Bake- 

 well and Brassington Moors, at Minninglow, and at Five Wells, 

 Taddington. Of the last-named there are detailed accounts in 

 his Vestiges, 6°c. (1848), 91 ; in the Journal of the British 

 Archceological Association, vii. (1852), 210, with an illustration 

 from a drawing of mine; and in The Reliquary of October, 

 1 90 1. The large number of bones found at Tideslow indicates 

 that they were deposited in a chambered mound rather than 

 in a series of separate cists; but whichever may have been 

 the form, the tumulus certainly belonged to the early Stone 

 Age. 



Mr. Addy affirms " it is something to know that a man of note 

 called Tid gave his name to Tideswell, and that he received the 

 lasting honour of mound-burial on a hill which overlooks that 

 town " (10th j., 92). As the personal name Tid and the funeral 

 mound low, forming the compound word Tidslow or Tideslow, 

 are Anglo-Saxon, if " a man of note called Tid " was interred 



