found at Aldington, Worcestershire. 



Ill 



have been probably suspended from the neck of a Briton, con- 

 sidered that the perforated flat plate found in the barrow on 

 Roundway Hill, was worn as a brooch or ornament on the breast. 

 The opinion alluded to as perhaps suggesting or confirming this 

 idea formed by Mr. Cunnington, was expressed by Sir R. C. Hoare 

 with reference to a slate perforated with three holes at each end 

 and flat on both sides, (vide pi. vii., fig. 3) discovered by the late Mr. 

 Cunnington of Heytesbury, at Sutton Yeney, Wilts, under the 

 right hand and close to the breast of a skeleton. This situation, 

 unless the left hand was also near to the breast, or unless we suppose 

 that in his lifetime the man whose body, to which it was contiguous, 

 used his right hand in grasping the bow, appears to favour the suppo- 

 sition entertained by the eminent antiquary Sir R. C. Hoare with 

 regard to the part of the body on which it was worn and to be 

 adverse to the theory which I am inclined to adopt, that the pur- 

 pose for which all the slate tablets were shaped and perforated, 

 and some of them hollowed at the cost of infinite labour was that 

 they might be fitted and fastened to the wrist. The great labour 

 however bestowed in hollowing the latter kind of tablets, is of 

 itself a main argument in support of my view, for surely had they 

 been intended to be worn as brooches or suspended from the neck, 

 the trouble would not have been taken to render them concave, 

 when it would have answered the purpose better to have allowed 

 them to continue flat. But to add the weight of another example 

 to the one on which my argument chiefly depends, I must now 

 allege the discovery at the commencement of this very year 1865, 

 with a body and urn in a cist on the farm of Fyrish Evan town, 

 Inverness, of a piece of slate, the exact counterpart in all but the 

 size, of the one in my possession ; hollowed on one side, smoothed 

 on both surfaces, perforated with four holes, countersunk only on 

 the concave side, and admirably adapted for the use for which I 

 have suggested such tablets were employed. This plate is deposited 

 in the Edinburgh Museum of Antiquities, and has been submitted 

 through the courtesy of the curator, Mr. Macculloch to my in- 

 spection. Although it falls short by little less than an inch of the 

 one figured in plate vi., and comprises only J of an inch in width, 



