Fig. 43.—HOLED TOMBSTONE, BURGHEAD.
(From Mitchell’s “The Past and the Present.”)
The monument is still where it was, and is in the same condition. Whether boys still knock and look in I do not know.[44]
Curiously enough, a somewhat similar practice exists at Burghead, about nine miles from Elgin, which is described by Professor Mitchell in his “Rhind Lectures,” 1880. He says: “There is a memorial slab built into the wall of the burial-ground, called the Chapel Yard, at the south-east corner; it is 35 inches high by 20 inches wide; close above it, and also built into the wall, there is a hewn lintel-like stone, 37 inches long by 1½ inches thick. On the narrow exposed face of this stone there is no sculpturing.
“The woodcut shows the position on the cradle stone (as it is called) of a cup-like hollow, which is quite round 2¼ inches in depth. This hollow has been produced by the children of Burghead, who are in the habit of striking the spot with a beachstone (which is also represented in the woodcut), and then quickly putting their ears to the place, when the sound of a rocking cradle and the crying of a child are said to be heard, as if coming from a cavern deep under ground. I am told that during last century the stone was not visited by children, but by women, who believed that they were to become mothers if they heard the rocking of the cradle and the crying of the child after tapping on the stone.”
What is certainly a curious coincidence is that the pre-historic rude stone ossuaries, dolmens or cromlechs, have very frequently in like manner a hole worked in them.
Trevethy cromlech, in the parish of St. Cleer, Cornwall, has a hole perforating the capstone. The Maison des Fées at Grammont, in Hérault, has a hole bored through the head or western supporter. Another, now destroyed, was at Cahaignes, in Normandy. The covered avenue of Conflans now transferred to the fosse of the Musée, St. Germain, has not only the round hole bored in one upright, but also the stone that closed this opening.[45]
Holes in like manner have been bored in the cromlechs of Avening and Rodmarton. Those in Circassia, in Palestine, and in India, have also holes. Colonel Meadows Taylor found that 1,100 dolmens out of 2,219 in the Dekhan had these holes in them. Similar holes have been observed in the dolmens of Sardinia.
