326 
To go back to the larger grave-hills — all of them, with 
scarcely a single exception, have been at some time or other 
opened at the centre, and the excavation having been con- 
tinued to the original moor-surface, in only far too many 
instances proofs are not wanting to shew that the central, and, 
doubtless, the original interment has been reached, and 
ruthlessly destroyed on the spot. Thus, to particularise one 
case — which may serve as an illustration of a vast number — 
in the course of April in last year, I was busy about opening a 
grave-hill of fully average size, situated on the moor near 
Waupley. Careful sinking on the north flank revealed a 
layer of fine sand, some inches thick, smoothly laid over a 
mass of stone fragments, placed together so as to make a 
level platform of some 30 feet or so in diameter. In the 
centre there had been, as it eventually appeared, a carefully 
constructed stone Cist, covered with one large, long flag- 
stone. But the removal of the upper surface and the soil 
beneath it, in proximity to the centre, disclosed, long before 
the Cist was reached, the fact that two urns had been broken 
there at some not very recent period, and their sherds thrown 
confusedly amid a quantity of soil which was not now in the 
place it originally occupied. On reaching the Cist this 
circumstance was only too fully explained. Other fragments 
of the urns, and considerable quantities of calcined bones 
and charcoal were mixed up throughout the earthy matter 
now filling the Cist : while the covering "stone was left 
standing upright at the west end, just as the former 
excavators had left it after raising it from its covering 
position, and obtaining access to the relics it had protected so 
long. 
The fact that the urns and their contents had been treated 
thus regardlessly and ruthlessly shews conclusively enough 
that these former investigations to which our Cleveland 
Grave-hills have been subjected, were not made by the 
