Mr. J. Hardy on Sepulchral Monuments. 105 



any of the original native tribes*; and affords an indication that 

 they belong to a class of antiquities, unconnected with the pre- 

 sent Saxon population, and placed beyond the sera of their tra- 

 ditional reminiscences. As they lie in close proximity to the 

 cairns, and afford in the slabbed coffin of some of the larger 

 heaps, evidences of a common origin and object, we cannot look 

 upon them in any other view than as sepulchral. In the whole 

 group combined, there is doubtless before us here the burial-place 

 of a numerous race of men, where the prince lies undistinguish- 

 able from the peasant only by the height of his heap ; the one 

 indeed dignified with a rude coffin, the other committed to the 

 bare earth ; but both equal at last, in the impenetrable oblivion 

 entailed on all such modes of commemoration. 



Another of these heaps, that rose to the dignity of having a 

 name, was called Craw's Cairn, of which the last vestiges disap- 

 peared in 1823. Report speaks of an urn having been found in 

 it, about the commencement of the century. This is not impro- 

 bable, since this mode of sepulture has been observed in various 

 instances within the immediate vicinity. On the 11th of May, 

 1825, an urn was turned up by the plough, under some small 

 heaps of stones, near Bankhouse. Another was found in 1830, 

 at the foot of Penmanshiel Wood, nearly in a line with the cairn, 

 and not more than a quarter of a mile from it, and at no great 

 distance from some old " camps " that once existed on Bushiel 

 Farm ; and a third was found, May 23rd, 1844, above Aikieside, 

 on the farm of Aldcambus Townhead, someway near the site as- 

 signed by tradition to a small fortified circlet. The first is now in 

 the possession of Sir Samuel Stirling, of Glorat and Ren ton; a por- 

 tion of the second is in my possession ; and the third is preserved: 

 by Mr. Hood, the tenant of the farm on which it was discovered. 

 The urns were of a primitive sort, of native manufacture, from 

 the "ha'" or ochrey clay of the ditches. They had originally 

 been baked in a fire, being of a dun colour without, but black 

 internally ; an appearance assumed by the clay of which they had 

 been fabricated, when it is heated for a short time in an open fire. 

 The patterns were nearly uniform. The one in possession of 

 Mr. Hood is one foot in diameter at the mouth, and as much in 

 depth, and from 3 feet 4 inches to 3 feet 6 inches in circumfe- 

 rence at the greatest girt. The lip or brim is about an inch wide, 

 and has a single row of herring-bone ornament. The lip projects 

 exteriorly like a rim ; and beneath it there are other two elevated 

 encircling ridges, with slightly depressed intervals, ornamented 



* The country from Leeds westward, over great part of Lancashire, was 

 thickly populated in the Saxon times by Cymry, whom old authors call in- 

 differently Britons, Picts, Wallenses, and Galwegenses. (Hodgson's Hist. 

 of Northumberland, Part II. vol. iii. 22.) 



