164 Mr. George Tate on Ancient Sculptured Rochs, ^c. 



much splayed on both sides, and suiRciently large to admit of 

 a human hand passing through. The Stone of Odin, at Sten- 

 nis, in the Orkneys, had a similar perforation, and through 

 this, hands were joined when solemn engagements were made 

 and Orcadian marriages celebrated. Some half century ago, 

 an ignorant farmer destroyed this venerable relic. Some of 

 these standing stones are 12 feet in height ; and not only 

 the inscribed rocks in situ, but also the standing stones are 

 striated and smoothed, affording evidence of glacial action in 

 the valley long anterior to the age of these sculpturings. A 

 sketch of one of these inscribed standing stones is given in 

 Plate II., Jig. 4. 



It is important to notice the mineral character of the rock ; 

 it is not a greenstone, but an indurated chloritic schist, of 

 about the same hardness as most of the stone celts found in 

 Northumberland — so hard indeed, judging from a specimen 

 taken from one of the standing stones, that I do not think 

 the sculptures have been made by a stone tool. Figures 

 may, it is true, be eroded by rubbing with a flint or 

 other hard stone; but the distinct marks left by a blunt 

 pointed tool prove, that the figures have not been formed in 

 that manner, but by a chipping process. I am therefore of 

 opinion, that these inscriptions have been made by a metallic 

 instrument. 



The whole of this valley, as Professor Simpson describes 

 it, is a vast old cemetery with cairns, circles, monoliths, &c. ; 

 and the inscriptions here are more directly connected with 

 burial places than those in Northumberland. One incised 

 stone has been found within a cist-vaen, but not as a cover ; 

 perhaps it may have been one of the side-stones; and on this 

 is a figure formed of four concentric quadrangles with a cen- 

 tral hollow and radial groove — analogous to a form on 

 the Dod-law stone — Plate VI., Jig. 1. Each of the standing 

 stones may mark a sepulchre, especially one which is 

 surrounded with a circle of small stones. Diggings have not 

 been made around and beneath these monoliths ; but recently 

 the Rev. Wm. Greenwell has explored, by diggings, one circle 

 and some of the barrows in the neighbourhood of these stand- 

 ing stones. The results corroborate the conclusion that the 

 sculptures in Argyleshire are of the same age, and the work 

 of the same people, as those in Northumberland. Usually the 

 body was buried in a contracted cist, as in Northumberland, 

 along with an urn and flint instruments and flakes ; in one 

 large cairn was discovered a rudely chambered sepulchre; 



