MORTIMER : PRE-HISTORY OF THE VILLAGE OF FIMBER. 225 
The next Barrow is situated on the terminal end of a natural 
eminence of the chalk rock called Church Hill, in the centre of the 
village. Its discovery was made June 4th, 1869, while taking down 
the old church, and excavating the foundations for a new one, about 
to be built by the present Sir Tatton Sykes, Bart., who has, with 
great liberality, built and restored several other churches in the 
neighbourhood. At the same time traces of the foundations of an 
earlier and larger church than the one just taken down were here 
and there observed. 
The debris of this early church was in some places 18 to 20 
inches in thickness, and contained numerous small pieces of burnt 
wood, and towards the west end bits of stained glass, and a consider- 
able quantity of melted lead, which had in places run into small 
openings and cavities in the debris, giving strong proof that this 
early church had been destroyed by fire. It was also then shown 
that this early church had stood upon an artificial mound, apparently 
an oval barrow, consisting of horizontal beds of clay, interspersed 
with horizontal patches of loose flint-stones of various sizes. These 
had been obtained from the surface of the surrounding land, whilst 
the clay, which at first we mistook for a natural bed of " Hessle Clay " 
capping the chalk, had been obtained from a bed of clay filling a 
hollow in the surface, and now the site of two fine meres, whicli 
adorn the centre of the village . 
Probably the obtaining of this clay for building the barrow, and 
bedaubing the wattled huts of that and succeeding periods," left the 
hollows which in part now form the beds of the present meres. 
This supposition has been supported. During the very dry summer 
of 1826, an attempt was made to remove the mud from the large oval 
and most easterly mere, but when about half completed the weather 
* Even some of the partition walls in the interior of the old house in 
which the writer was born, an interesting old place, now consists of clay obtained 
from the localities of these meres, mixed with a little short straw, and it is 
known that originally its outer walls also, as well as the walls of most of the 
other old houses in the village were at first entirely composed of this clayey 
substance, which is found in no other place nearer than the village of Friday - 
thorpe, a distance of nearly two miles, where also a bed of clay is the site of 
two meres in the centre of the village, and there are other instances. 
