The spear-head (Fig.8) is a long and stout-bladed weapon, straight-edged, and tapering equally from the butt of the blade, which is unbarbed, the short neck of the blade passing gradually into the rounded socket. The blade is now only 7 inches in length, but was probably about 10 inches long and 2 inches wide at the butt. The socket still contains a portion of the wood of the shaft.
With these weapons there are other relics to which it is less easy to assign a definite purpose, such as the iron object (Fig. [9]), 6 inches in length, which may have been the ferrule of a shaft, if not the heel of the spear-shaft itself, which was often mounted with an iron prong for convenience of thrusting it into the ground.
Fig. 10.—Iron Ferrules found in grave No. 1 at Ballinaby.
Fig. 11.—Fragment of Iron from grave No. 1 at Ballinaby.
Fig. 12.—Bronze Plaque, from Oland (actual size).
Akin to this object is the broken portion of a conical ferrule (shown in Fig. [10]), and there are a number of fragments of an iron object with a corrugated surface, as if formed of thick wires laid side by side (Fig. [11]). None of the fragments suggest the probable size or form of the object when entire, or reveal its purpose. But in the figure of a warrior represented on a small bronze plaque (Fig. [12]), dug up in the island of Oland, we see a helmet formed of bands of somewhat similar appearance, and the sword he bears in his hand is a sword of the peculiar type associated with these peculiar relics.
