FOOTNOTES:
[184] Wallace's Orkney, p. 56.
[185] Hibbert's Shetland, p. 412.
[186] Sinclair's Statist. Acc. vol. xvii. p. 287.
[187] This is a name given to circles of standing stones in the Gaelic, from Taoursach or Tuirseach, mournful, and has been supposed to originate in the traditions of human sacrifices believed to have been offered within these inclosures. Vide Archæol. Scot. vol. i. p. 283. In the Journal of the Archæological Association (vol. ii. p. 340) a notice occurs of "a singular bowl-shaped cist and triangular cover of Bethesden limestone, found in Charing Church, Kent."
[188] Archæol. Scot. vol. i. p. 284.
[189] Smith's Life of Columba, p. 60.
[190] Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, 2d edit. p. 342.
CHAPTER VIII.
PERSONAL ORNAMENTS.
There only remain to be noted the earliest traces of luxury and personal adornment contemporary with the rude weapons and implements, and the simple habitations of earth or unhewn stone, described in the previous chapters. These are scarcely less abundant than the implements of war and the chase; and some of them possess a peculiar value for us, as presenting the sole surviving memorials of female influence, and of the position woman held in the primitive social state which we desire to trace out as the true and rudimentary chronological beginning of our island history. There must necessarily be some uncertainty in any attempt to assign to the two sexes their just share of the personal ornaments found in the early tumuli, or discovered in the course of disturbing the uncultivated soil. Man, in such a primitive state as we have abundant grounds for believing the Caledonian aborigines of the Stone Period to have been, delights in assuming to himself the personal ornaments with which, in a more advanced stage of social life, he finds a higher gratification in adorning woman. It should not, therefore, excite surprise when we find ornaments which modern civilisation resigns entirely to the fair sex, such as bracelets, hair-pins, neck ornaments, and the like, mingling with the sword and the spear of the rude barbarian chief. Still, there are some ornaments, and especially bead necklaces, bracelets, and some of the smaller and more delicate armillæ, which we can hardly err in classing among female decorations. The subject, however, is well deserving of further attention, and the more so, as the evidence which is available in the case of sepulchral remains is of so satisfactory and decisive a character when reported on by competent witnesses. There can be no doubt, from the disclosures of numerous tumuli and cists, that the dead were frequently buried "in their habits as they lived," and with all their most prized personal adornments upon them, though time has made sad havoc of their funeral pomp, and scarcely allows a glimpse even of the naked skeleton that crumbles into dust under our gaze.
The rudest class of personal ornaments which are found in the sepulchral mounds, or in the safer chance depository of the bogs, are those formed of bone or horn; but they are necessarily of rare occurrence, not only from the remoteness of the period to which we conceive them to belong, but from the frail nature of the material in which they have been wrought, which, when deposited among the memorials of the dead, yields to decay not greatly less rapid than the remains it should adorn, and crumbles to dust when restored to light and air. Still some few of these fragile relics have been preserved, consisting of perforated beads of bone, horn pins, perforated animals' teeth, and other equally rude fragments of necklaces or pendants; but very few of them present much attempt at artificial decoration by means of incised ornaments or carving, such as is found to have been so extensively practised in a later age. One curious set of bone ornaments in the Scottish Museum includes a piece of ivory pierced with a square perforation, and another with a nut or button fitting into it, the clasp or fibula it may be of some robe of honour worn by a chief of the ancient race.
Ornaments of jet or shale and cannel coal, and large beads of glass and pebble, are of much more frequent occurrence in the Scottish grave-mounds, and furnish extremely interesting and varied evidence of the decorative arts of these remote ages. Many of them, however, are found under circumstances which leave no room to doubt that they belong to a period coeval with the introduction of metals, and the skill acquired in the practice of the metallurgic arts.
There is another class of relics, however, which we can feel no hesitation in ranking among the earliest remains of the Stone Period, though it may sometimes be difficult to determine whether we should regard them as mere personal ornaments or as charms employed in the mysterious rites of Pagan superstition, as it is not uncommon to find them used, at a very recent date, by their illiterate inheritors in some of the remoter districts of the Highlands and Isles. One relic, for example, in the Scottish Museum, consists of a flat reddish stone, roughly polished. It measures 4 inches in length, and about 2¾ inches in its greatest breadth, and is notched in a regular form, with two holes perforated through it. It was presented to the Society of Scottish Antiquaries in 1784, as a charm in use among the population of the island of Islay for the cure of diseases. From its correspondence with others of the earliest class of relics, it can hardly admit of a doubt that it belongs to the personal ornaments of the Stone Period, and may have owed the reverence of its more recent possessor to the fact of its discovery within some primitive cist, or in the charmed circle of Taoursanan, the origin of which is commonly ascribed to superhuman powers. It is worthy of note, indeed, that the word Druidheachd is no longer associated with the priesthood of the British groves, but is now only used by the Scottish Highlanders as applicable to sorcery or magic. Another, but much less perfect ornament of perforated reddish stone, in the same collection with the above, was found, along with several flint arrow-heads, in the island of Harris; and a third, still ruder, was discovered, with a similar arrow-head, on the Lomond Hills of Fifeshire. But perhaps the most singular relics of the Stone Period ever discovered in Scotland are two stone collars, found near the celebrated Parallel Roads of Glenroy, and now preserved at the mansion of Tonley, Aberdeenshire. They are each of the full size of a collar adapted to a small Highland horse; the one formed of trap or whinstone, and the other of a fine-grained red granite. They are not, however, to be regarded as the primitive substitutes for the more convenient materials of later introduction. On the contrary, a close imitation of the details of a horse collar of common materials is attempted, including the folds of the leather, nails, buckles, and holes for tying particular parts together. They are finished with much care and a high degree of polish, and are described as obviously the workmanship of a skilful artist. Mr. Skene, who first drew attention to these remarkable relics, suggests the probability of the peculiar natural features of Glenroy having led to the selection of this amphitheatre for the scene of ancient public games; and that these stone collars might commemorate the victor in the chariot race, as the tripods still existing record the victor in the Choragic games of Athens. But no circumstances attending their discovery are known which could aid conjecture either as to the period or purpose of their construction.[191]
In the year 1832, a large tumulus, on the shore of Broadford Bay, Isle of Skye, was levelled in the progress of some improvements on the estate of Corry, and it was found to cover a rudely vaulted chamber, within which lay a cist inclosing a human skeleton, along with various bones of animals, the species of which were not ascertained. Alongside of the skeleton an ornament of polished pale green stone was discovered, measuring about 2½ inches in length, by 2 inches in breadth. Its form will be best understood by the annexed woodcut. It is convex on the upper side, and concave on the under side, with a small hole drilled at each of the four corners, and an ornamental border of slightly indented ovals along one end. It differs only in dimensions from another previously referred to, in the collection of Adam Arbuthnot, Esq., of Peterhead, which was obtained from a tumulus at Cruden, Aberdeenshire. It measures 4¼ inches in length. Another ornament of polished green stone was afterwards discovered in the neighbourhood of the tumulus at Broadford Bay. It measures about 3½ inches in length, and nearly an inch in breadth at the centre, but tapers to about half an inch in breadth at either end, where a small hole is drilled through. It is only a fifth of an inch in thickness. Simple as are the forms of both of these relics, they represent a class which appear to have been common among the personal decorations of the Stone Period, whether regarded merely as ornaments, or valued for some hidden virtue which may have been supposed to pertain to them. A sepulchral deposit, closely corresponding to that found in the Isle of Skye, was discovered by some labourers employed in sinking a ditch at Tring, in Hertfordshire, about the year 1763. The relics were entirely of the same rude primitive class, and it furnished an example in confirmation of previous remarks regarding the earliest sepulchral rites, as the skeleton was found laid at full length, with legs and arms extended. Between the legs lay some flint arrow-heads, and at the feet ornaments resembling, both in form and material, those found in the tumulus at Broadford Bay.[192] Sir R. C. Hoare describes objects of similar character, found in the barrows of Wiltshire, some of which were made of blue slate;[193] and small perforated plates of stone or flint, of slightly varying forms, are not uncommon among the contents of the earlier British tumuli. They are not, however, confined to Britain. Simple as are the forms of the two relics figured above, there is a sufficiently marked character about them to excite our surprise when we meet with them in the grave of the ancient native of Skye, and in the cists of Herts or Wiltshire; but ornaments of almost exactly the same forms have been discovered in the mounds of the great valley of the Mississippi,[194] accompanied with celts, stone hatchets, and other primitive implements closely resembling those of the British Stone Period; though also with many more so essentially differing, as to forbid us deducing from such chance coincidences any fanciful community of origin between the Allophylian colonists of Europe and the aborigines of America.
Still ruder are the primitive necklaces, formed of the common small shells of our coasts, such as the Nerita litoralis, and even the Patella vulgata, or common limpet, perforated, apparently, by the simple process of rubbing the point on a stone, and then strung together with a fibre or sinew. It may perhaps be thought by some that sufficient space has already been devoted to this infantile period of the race, yet childish as such decorations seem, they are found among the valued relics of men whose giant monuments have outlived many massive structures destined by later ages to perpetuate the memory of historic deeds, or consecrated to the services of the all-powerful Church of medieval Christendom. Underneath the cromlech discovered on levelling a tumulus in the Phœnix Park at Dublin, in 1838, two male skeletons were disclosed, and beside the skull of each lay the perforated shells of a necklace which had doubtless been placed around their necks when they were deposited in the simple but grand mausoleum that still attests the veneration of the ancient natives for their chiefs. A portion of the vegetable fibre with which they had been strung together remained through some of the shells, and the only other relics found in the grave were a small fibula of bone, and a knife or lance-head of flint. The common British bivalves are also found used for similar decorations. In a cist discovered on the coast of the Frith of Forth, during the construction of the Edinburgh and Granton Railway, the only relics deposited beside the skeleton which it enclosed were a quantity of the cardium commune, or cockle, of different sizes, rubbed down until they were reduced nearly to rings; while in another cist, opened at Orkney, and more particularly referred to in a previous chapter, about two dozen oyster shells were discovered, each perforated with a hole nearly an inch in diameter.