50 



On British Stone and Earthworks 



district would lead us to infer that such must have been the case : 

 inasmuch as that portion of the downs lying between Overton and 

 Rockley is strewed far and wide with huge boulders of sarsen stones, 

 which — though clustered more thickly in the valleys, as if the bed 

 of some gigantic dried-up torrent — extend in smaller numbers and 

 in scattered disorder over the surrounding hills, and thus offer close 

 at hand the materials of which kistvaens are built. 



Yet, notwithstanding their former prevalence on our downs, as I 

 conjecture, those to which I am now about to call attention are (I 

 believe) the only kistvaens remaining to us in this part of North 

 Wilts, indeed the sole representatives of such monuments in the 

 county, if we except the very interesting, though fallen, one called 

 " Lugbury 33 in the extreme north-west, on the very borders of 

 Gloucestershire, sometimes spoken of as in the parish of Littleton 

 Drew, and sometimes as if in Nettleton, but in reality, as I under- 

 stand, in the parish of Castle Combe. 1 



The three kistvaens, then, to which I am now referring, though 

 all in the same neighbourhood and within a very short distance of 

 one another, do not lie in the same valley ; are thoroughly distinct 

 from one another ; and have no apparent connection. There is no 

 more interesting portion of our downs than that wild rock-strewn 

 district which stretches above Rockley, towards Abury ; and here — 

 each in its separate valley — these weird relics of a primitive race 

 stood. If you take the Ordnance Map of this neighbourhood, and 

 draw a straight line from the town of Marlborough westwards for 

 about two miles and a-half, and then carry your eye northwards, 

 but very slightly inclining to the west, you will find at intervals of 

 nearly a mile apart, three " Trilithons/' depicted after the manner 

 of ordnance surveyors, and inscribed as "Cromlechs/' I am thus 

 careful to point out their exact locality, because I have been often 

 surprized to find that to many who have lived within easy reach of 

 these most interesting relics of antiquity, their existence has been 

 wholly unknown, and few, I will venture to say, of the members of 

 this Archseological Society have visited all the three kistvaens, 



1 Magazine, vol. iii., pp. 164 — 173. 



