332 



A Sketch of the Parish of Yalesbury. 



Valens had recently been found. Both barrows had been about 

 twenty feet high, and their bases were still of an extent to admit o£ 

 such a proportionate height. The man who had been employed to 

 lower them sixteen years before gave the following account as to the 

 first of the two which we examined, being that towards Abury. 

 He said, he had " cut it down a matter of nine feet, throwing the 

 earth over the sides. There was a little box of metal three inches 

 long : it had a lid at one end, and a chain fixed in the middle, and 

 it had been fastened to the end where it opened : it was round. 

 About a yard deep, there were three beads — terra cotta, one was 

 produced — as big as his finger round ; a knife fit to stick a pig, and 

 two skeletons lying at full length." At a depth of eight feet in 

 this barrow, we came to a large quantity of very black substance, 

 like charcoal, or rather burnt straw, numerous bits of bone of the 

 various kinds, fragments of pottery, &c, and a large cist containing 

 a considerable quantity of burnt human bones. The closeness of the 

 soil of which these barrows were formed, and the depth to which it 

 was necessary to descend, precluded the Dean from reaching the 

 bottom of the other barrow, but the following day, under the super- 

 intendence of the Rector of the parish — the Rev. J. S. Money-Kyrle 

 — the workmen came to a layer of the black substance, burnt straw 

 apparently, and below that to a most curious deposit, a cist, at the 

 depth of eight feet, formed at the level of the adjoining land, con- 

 taining an unusual quantity of burnt human bones. These had been 

 deposited in the hollow of a tree, and a piece of the cleft wood, the 

 side of the tree, had been placed over it. From the peculiar clayey 

 and damp quality of the earth, it was so greatly decayed, that it 

 might be difficult to determine its former substance, although it 

 appeared, by the remains of fibres, and lines of the grain of the 

 wood, to have been oak : the wood was four feet long by two-and- 

 a-half broad, and eighteen inches thick, being reduced in places by 

 compression. About the middle of this, on the apex of the mass of 

 bones, and beneath the wooden cover, lay a bronze blade of a hunting 

 spear : 1 the two rivets which had fixed it to the staff remained in 



1 Figured under the letter T in the Salisbury volume of the Institute, and re- 

 produced here by permission. 



