76 Archceologia. 



tures, as it is well known, consist chiefly of groups of concentric 

 circles, with straight lines drawn from the centre to the exterior, 

 and sometimes from the centre of one group to that of another 

 group. Mr. Tate, whose essay we recommend to the attention of our 

 readers, thinks that these sculptures date back as far as from 2500 to 

 3000 years ago, that they are the work of the primeval Celts, that 

 they were made with stone implements, and that they have a sym- 

 bolical meaning. Mr. Greenwell considers them to be undoubtedly 

 religious. Mr. Tate quotes a writer in Notes and Queries, who says, 

 that in a Welsh book, published in 1710, allusion is made to a 

 custom formerly prevalent among shepherds in Wales, of cutting 

 on the turf a labyrinthine form they called Caer-Droida — the walls 

 of Troy — a practice supposed to commemorate the Trojan origin of 

 the Welsh. A similar custom, Mr. Tate says, was continued even 

 in a recent period, by the herdsmen on the grassy plains of Burgh 

 and Rockliff Marshes, in Cumberland ; but from the description of 

 these figures, he conjectures that they were serpentine and spiral, like 

 the sculptures at New Grange and in Brittany. We perfectly 

 recollect the Troy town, as it was a common amusement to draw 

 it on slates in our school-boy days, on the borders of Wales, but 

 among the pure English stock on this side the border ; and they 

 certainly were not the spirals Mr. Tate supposes, but resembled 

 rather closely some of these sculptures on the rocks. Moreover, 

 we, as boys, had a very widely-prevailing practice of drawing 

 groups of concentric circles, for a game, or rather a trick, which 

 produced just such groups with lines from the centres, sometimes 

 joining two centres, exactly in the same manner as these concentric 

 circles represented on the rocks. We have seen the slate of a boy, 

 who happened not to have at hand a sponge to rub out one group 

 before he made another, covered with them, and presenting an 

 exact counterpart of the groups of sculptures on the Northumbrian 

 rocks. We confess that we feel some difficulty in accepting the 

 extreme antiquity of these sculptures, and still more the notion of 

 their being of a religious or symbolical character. We may add 

 that Professor Simpson, of Edinburgh, has contributed to the new 

 volume (vol. 5, new series) of the Transactions of the Historic Society 

 of Lancashire and Cheshire, a short paper on sculpture of a similar 

 character, found on the Caldee Stones, near Liverpool, in which he 

 takes a similar view of their antiquity, but is unwilling to venture 

 an opinion as to their purpose. 



The same volume of the Transactions of the Historic Society con- 

 tains a rather elaborate paper on the bone caves of Craven, and 

 their contents, by a well-known and meritorious antiquary, Mr. 

 Ecroyd Smith. These caves, chiefly found at Settle and Arncliffe, 

 contain human bones, with the bones of numerous animals, two or 

 three of which belong to species now extinct in our island, and a 

 considerable number of objects of human manufacture, such as 

 coins, fibula?, etc. By far the greater portion of these are undoubt- 

 edly ltoman, and belong to a late period of the Roman occupation 

 of our island, while the other objects are 'merely of ruder materials 

 and ruder workmanship, and present no characteristics which 



