Archceologia. 71 



ARCHLY OLOGIA. 



Mb. J. T. Blight, a zealous and careful antiquary, and very clever 

 artist and engraver, of Penzance, has contributed to the July 

 number of the Gentleman's Magazine an excellent though short 

 paper on Cornish Barrows. The barrows to which Mr. Blight 

 directs attention in this essay are of a peculiar class, large tumuli, 

 containing at least one rather extensive chamber, and sometimes 

 several smaller ones, formed of massive stones, and they are found 

 chiefly in the West of England, in the Scilly Islands, in the 

 Channel Islands, and in Brittany. Oar own impression is that these 

 tumuli are not of an extreme antiquity — they do not belong to a 

 very barbarous population, but to one which has made advance in 

 social progress, and has attained to about the social condition of the 

 Anglo-Saxons, a little before they entered Britain, or of the 

 Icelanders in the time of Burnt Nj'al. They belong probably to the 

 Britons of the South-West, from no very remote period before the 

 Roman period to some time after the establishment of the Roman 

 power, and were the burial-places of the patriarchal heads of 

 families of importance, where, probably, generation after generation 

 was interred. Such barrows are not found in the central and 

 then more barbarous parts of the island, because they were held by 

 the older populations, while these districts had received an immi- 

 gration of more civilized peoples. In Scilly they are called giants r 

 graves — a common popular name for anything ancient. In its 

 simplest form, the receptacle of the dead in these tumuli is a mere 

 square chamber, an expansion of the idea of the ruder cromlech, 

 though more elaborately built ; in its more enlarged character it 

 took the form of a great subterranean gallery, as at Bolleit and 

 Pendeen, in Cornwall. The chamber of the barrow at Pennance, 

 in the parish of Zennor, described by Mr. Blight, is nine feet six 

 inches in length, by four feet in width, and four feet four inches 

 high. It is constructed in that bold sort of Cyclopean masonry 

 which has prevailed in Cornwall down to the present day, the 

 more massive stones formin°; the basement of the walls. That of 

 the end of the chamber is formed almost entirely of one single 

 slab. The roof consists of large slabs of granite thrown hori- 



zontally across from wall to wall. This chamber lay in a direction 

 from north-west to south-east, the entrance being from the north- 

 eastern end, where there was no wall, and access was easily 

 obtained by clearing away a part of the side of the moimd. This* 

 mound is twenty-three feet in diameter, and eight feet in height. 

 It is bounded by a circle of retaining stones, some of them of large 

 dimensions, and is filled up with stones chiefly, mixed with some 

 earth, piled around and over the cell. JNTo remains were found in 

 the chamber, or cell, of this barrow, which has been the case 

 with others of the same class, probably in consequence of the 

 depredations of people who, at some perhaps remote period, opened 

 them in search of treasure. Mr. Blight describes the opening, at 

 which he assisted, of two other Cornish barrows, on Conquer 



