A HISTORY OF CUMBERLAND 
may have been torques. ‘They were sold to a silversmith in Carlisle, who 
gave £7 for one of them and £20 for another, and no doubt have long 
ago been melted. The evidence is not sufficient to enable any certain 
conclusion to be arrived at. In Whellan’s Cumberland, a find of stone 
beads in a barrow of stones at Gillfoot, Hesket-Newmarket, is recorded. 
There was there what the writer calls a 
Druid’s Grove, consisting of two parallel rows of large oak trees, extending 150 
yards in length, and the rows 12 yards distant. In a level field at the middle of the 
two rows was a barrow of stones. The trees were cut down and the barrow removed 
in the year 1794, when beneath the barrow several places where human bones had 
been burnt and deposited were discovered, as also numerous pieces of flint and stone 
beads and a stone battle axe (p. 225). 
Nothing is said as to what the beads were like: and the writer of 
the above account, writing in 1860, does not tell how he got his informa- 
tion as to a find of beads in 1794. Beads of cannel coal, twelve in 
number, were actually inside an ‘incense cup,’ found in a large tumulus 
at Old Parks, Kirkoswald, as will be presently related. 
The reason of these deposits is generally stated to be that this pre- 
historic race had a belief in a future state of which the conditions would 
be similar to the conditions of life upon this earth : conditions in which 
the man would still want his implements of war and of the chase, and 
the woman her ornaments. Other reasons may be imagined, such as 
a superstitious dislike to, or fear of, a dead man’s belongings. But 
whatever the reason was, the puzzle is that in the majority of cases of 
interment, nothing whatever is found. When things are found they 
are of little value. This points to these people being very poor. Indeed 
one can hardly fancy any but a poor race clinging to the cold and barren 
fells and moors. 
A vessel or vessels of earthenware are frequently found with inter- 
ments, whether of burnt or unburnt bones. These vessels have been 
divided into cinerary urns, ‘incense cups,’ ‘ food vessels’ and ‘ drink- 
ing cups ’—a misleading nomenclature, but one which Canon Greenwell 
considers it both difficult and undesirable to alter, particularly as we do 
not know with absolute certainty what these vessels were originally 
intended for. In Canon Greenwell’s experience he finds the cinerary 
urn and the ‘incense cup’ accompany burnt bodies, while the ‘ food 
vessel’ and the ‘drinking cup’ accompany both burnt and unburnt 
bodies, though he states it is rare to find the ‘drinking cup’ with burnt 
bodies. 
The older antiquaries used to imagine that this pottery was sun- 
dried ; that is not so. In that case damp would long ago have caused 
the vessels to return to the original clay out of which they were formed. 
They were baked before an open fire, whose smoke has often stained the 
manufactured article in places. The clay of which the larger vessels is 
made, is largely mixed with broken stone, with the object of making the 
clay firmer and less likely to crack in the baking. Neither artificial 
colour, nor glazing is ever employed, though most of the drinking 
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