330 A Sketch of the Parish of Yatesbury. 



much-thronged neighbour. Midway between the two villages, skele- 

 tons have, within the last few years, been from time to time met with 

 by labourers digging post-holes in the open ground, where no vestige 

 of a grave marked the interment : and only three years since two 

 large sarsen stones lying one upon another, just below the surface, 

 and which endangered the ploughshare, were removed, and these — 

 we may conjecture — would indicate the burial of one more honoured 

 than common. Other vestiges of that early British period we have 

 in four large barrows, one in the centre of the village, another within 

 the village at the south-east, and two outside the village, to the east, 

 near the lane leading to Abury, universally known as " Barrow- 

 way." There are also several earthworks of unknown origin, to wit, 

 on the north-west of the village, in a field called Cow-Leaze, a very 

 small square enclosure, from which on three sides long lines o£ 

 banks diverge to a considerable distance : and near the bottom of 

 the village — the " Street/'' as it is called here — there is much broken 

 irregular ground, trenches more or less deep and important, with 

 mounds in correspondence. In reference to this broken ground, 

 Dean Merewether suggested — -though there is not a scrap of evidence 

 to countenance any such supposition — that " it is not impossible 

 that a detachment of forces, in their march previous to the battle of 

 Roundway Hill, near Devizes, may have halted here, and thrown 

 up a hasty earthwork for their defence during the night, although 

 [he adds] the general unevenness in question cannot be thus ac- 

 counted for/'' 1 I would venture to submit, that if such was the 

 origin of the earthworks, it was more probably at a period some two 

 thousand years or more before the battle of Roundway. All the 

 barrows in the parish were opened and the earthworks examined by 

 Dr. Merewether, then Dean of Hereford, when he was superintending 

 in 1849 the driving a tunnel into the heart of Silbury, under the 

 auspices of the Archseological Institute, then holding its annual meet- 

 ing at Salisbury ; and a full account of them and the results of their 

 explorations was given in the Salisbury volume of that society. The 



1 Salisbury volume of Archaeological Institute, on examination of barrows and 

 earthworks near Silbury, page 95. 



