Grave-mounds and Their Contents / A Manual of Archæology, as Exemplified in the Burials of the Celtic, the Romano-British, and the Anglo-Saxon Periods

by Llewellynn Frederick William Jewitt

Fig. 4.

Fig. 5.

Barrows were not unfrequently surrounded by a circle of stones, set upright in the ground. These circles, in many instances, remain to the present day in different parts of the kingdom, and, the barrow itself having disappeared, are commonly called by the general appellation of “Druidical circles.” But of these, later on. The construction of the stone circles varied considerably. In some instances the upright stones were pretty close together; in others, wide apart; and in others, again, the spaces between the uprights were filled in with a rude loose rubble masonry, which thus formed a continuous wall.

Some tumuli contained stone chambers and passages, formed of massive upright slabs, and covered with immense blocks of stone. Over these chambers, etc., the mounds of earth, or of stone, or of both combined, were raised, as will be hereafter shown.

Interments in the Celtic grave-mounds were both by inhumation and cremation, and the modes of interment, in both these divisions, was very varied.

Where inhumation obtained, the body was sometimes laid on its side, in a contracted position; at others, extended full length on its back or side; and in other instances, again, was placed in an upright sitting or kneeling posture. Occasionally, too, where more than one body has been buried at the same time, they have been laid face to face, with their arms encircling each other; at other times an infant has been placed in its mother’s arms.

When cremation has been practised, the remains have either been gathered together in a small heap on the surface of the ground—sometimes enclosed in a small cist, at others left uncovered, and at others covered with a small slab of stone—or wrapped in a cloth or skin (the bone or bronze pin which has fastened the napkin being occasionally found), or enclosed in cinerary urns, inverted or otherwise. In some instances, even when placed in urns, they were first enclosed in a cloth.

These are the general characteristics of the interments of the Celtic period, and they will be best understood by the following examples.

When the body has been buried in a contracted position, it is found lying on its side; the left side being the most usual. The head generally inclines a little forward; the knees are drawn up near to the chest, and the heels to the thighs; the elbows are brought near to the knees,—frequently, indeed, one of them will be found beneath, and the other on, the knees, which have thus been held between them; and the hands are frequently brought up to the front of the face. This position, which is after all, perhaps, the most easy and natural one to choose, will be best understood by the following engraving ([fig. 6]), which shows an interment found in a barrow on Smerril Moor, opened by my much lamented friend the late Mr. Thomas Bateman. In this case the body had been laid on its left side in an irregularly formed cavity on the surface of the natural rock, on a bed of clay, over which, as usual, the mound was formed of loose stones and mould. Behind the skeleton, as will be seen in the engraving, was found a remarkably fine “drinking cup,” along with a bone meshing rule or modelling tool, twelve inches long, made from the rib of a horse or cow; a flint dagger; an arrow-head; and some other implements, also of flint, all of which had been burned. The femur of this skeleton measured nineteen and a half inches, and the tibia sixteen inches.