the downs, and passes within two miles of Yatesbury on the south: and as this was one of the great arteries of the kingdom, connecting the west with all other parts, in the admirable net-work system by which the rulers of the world knew how to ensure communication, when required, with every part of the province, those who lived within easy reach of it must have had some experience of the manners and customs of their civilized rulers. Then, to come to more modern times, the old London and Bath Road ran along the ridge of the hill from Beckhampton towards Calne; and when, about eighty years ago, it was altered, and brought down to its present position, on a lower level, it only advanced nearer to Yatesbury, and just before the introduction of railroads, to such a prodigious extent had the traffic increased on this road, that a perpetual stream of communication was always pouring along between the West of England and the capital; and a constant succession of stage-coaches, postchaises, fly-waggons and heavy wains passed day and night, and all within sight of our village: though it was only now and then, when a more than common snow-drift had blocked the road, and effaced all land-marks, that a coach has been known to flounder so far out. of the road as Yatesbury, a circumstance which served the gossips: of the village with an anecdote never to be forgotten, and which they are never tired of repeating, and to which I have patiently listened over and over again.

ANTIQUITIES.

Retired however and secluded though our village in all historical times must have been, it would in very early ages have been by no means unknown, from its proximity to the famous Temple of Abury; and when the multitudes who flocked together and thronged the great bank of the enclosure to witness the spectacles or the rites celebrated within the mystic circle (whatever and whenever those rites or spectacles may have been), it is only reasonable to suppose that the adjacent villages would be frequented by the multitudes on their way to and from, if not during the ceremonies at which they assisted in short, Yatesbury, some 2000 or 3000 years ago, was not improbably, a kind of ecclesiastical suburb to its noted and

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much-thronged neighbour. Midway between the two villages, skeletons have, within the last few years, been from time to time met with by labourers digging post-holes in the open ground, where no vestige of a grave marked the interment and only three years since two large sarsen stones lying one upon another, just below the surface, and which endangered the ploughshare, were removed, and thesewe may conjecture-would indicate the burial of one more honoured than common. Other vestiges of that early British period we have in four large barrows, one in the centre of the village, another within the village at the south-east, and two outside the village, to the east, near the lane leading to Abury, universally known as "Barrowway." There are also several earthworks of unknown origin, to wit, on the north-west of the village, in a field called Cow-Leaze, a very small square enclosure, from which on three sides long lines of banks diverge to a considerable distance: and near the bottom of the village-the "Street," as it is called here-there is much broken irregular ground, trenches more or less deep and important, with mounds in correspondence. In reference to this broken ground, Dean Merewether suggested-though there is not a scrap of evidence to countenance any such supposition-that "it is not impossible that a detachment of forces, in their march previous to the battle of Roundway Hill, near Devizes, may have halted here, and thrown up a hasty earthwork for their defence during the night, although [he adds] the general unevenness in question cannot be thus accounted for." I would venture to submit, that if such was the origin of the earthworks, it was more probably at a period some two thousand years or more before the battle of Roundway. All the barrows in the parish were opened and the earthworks examined by Dr. Merewether, then Dean of Hereford, when he was superintending in 1849 the driving a tunnel into the heart of Silbury, under the auspices of the Archæological Institute, then holding its annual meeting at Salisbury; and a full account of them and the results of their explorations was given in the Salisbury volume of that society. The

1

1 Salisbury volume of Archæological Institute, on examination of barrows and earthworks near Silbury, page 95.

barrow first opened was that in the centre of the village, close to the house of Mr. Tuckey, but "it did not produce any indications of former sepulture, except fragments of charcoal, and something like the oxidation of iron. It was composed of a close clayey soil, very different from the material of the barrows on the hills, as were áll the four examined here. In the second mound"-for so the Dean called these two, doubting if they were barrows-situated in the village, at the south-east corner, "the attack was made from the side by way of trench, on account of the size and the top being covered by a clump of fir trees. Many bones, of the ox probably and smaller animals, the hare in particular, one or two pieces of corroded iron and a part of the wards of a key 1 were found; but no

sepulchral deposit, although the trench was carried into the centre." The two barrows in "Barrow Field were then attacked, with anticipations the most encouraging, as they were distinguished by traditions which ranked them highly in the estimation of the inhabitants moreover a few hundred yards to the south-east of these barrows, in a field called Foxbury, the termination of which word perhaps denoted the existence of some earthwork which has disappeared before the plough, various Roman coins from Trajan to

1 Figured under the letter S in the Salisbury volume of the Institute, and reproduced here by permission.

Valens had recently been found. Both barrows had been about twenty feet high, and their bases were still of an extent to admit of such a proportionate height. The man who had been employed to lower them sixteen years before gave the following account as to the first of the two which we examined, being that towards Abury. He said, he had "cut it down a matter of nine feet, throwing the earth over the sides. There was a little box of metal three inches long it had a lid at one end, and a chain fixed in the middle, and it had been fastened to the end where it opened: it was round. About a yard deep, there were three beads-terra cotta, one was produced-as big as his finger round; a knife fit to stick a pig, and two skeletons lying at full length." At a depth of eight feet in this barrow, we came to a large quantity of very black substance, like charcoal, or rather burnt straw, numerous bits of bone of the various kinds, fragments of pottery, &c., and a large cist containing a considerable quantity of burnt human bones. The closeness of the soil of which these barrows were formed, and the depth to which it was necessary to descend, precluded the Dean from reaching the bottom of the other barrow, but the following day, under the superintendence of the Rector of the parish-the Rev. J. S. Money-Kyrle -the workmen came to a layer of the black substance, burnt straw apparently, and below that to a most curious deposit, a cist, at the depth of eight feet, formed at the level of the adjoining land, containing an unusual quantity of burnt human bones. These had been deposited in the hollow of a tree, and a piece of the cleft wood, the side of the tree, had been placed over it. From the peculiar clayey and damp quality of the earth, it was so greatly decayed, that it might be difficult to determine its former substance, although it appeared, by the remains of fibres, and lines of the grain of the wood, to have been oak: the wood was four feet long by two-anda-half broad, and eighteen inches thick, being reduced in places by compression. About the middle of this, on the apex of the mass of bones, and beneath the wooden cover, lay a bronze blade of a hunting 1 the two rivets which had fixed it to the staff remained in

spear:

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Figured under the letter T in the Salisbury volume of the Institute, and reproduced here by permission.

their respective holes, but the metal, from the extreme moisture of the situation, had become oxydised throughout, and when dried extremely brittle and friable; it was four-and-a-half inches in length and one-and-a-half inch in breadth at the broadest part." 1

Blade of a hunting spear, found in a barrow at Yatesbury.

In addition to these records of the contents of our barrows, Stukeley gives the following account of previous successful openings here: "Mr. Bray of Monkton open'd a barrow, among many others,

1 Salisbury volume of Institute, page 97.