Shafts of this description, frequently designated as "rubbish-holes," and considered by some to have been places of sepulture, wells, or store-houses for grain, resembling the silos of modern times, have been found in Thanet and various places in Kent, as also repeatedly in London[1]. The Hon. Richard Neville[2] has recently noticed one of these receptacles at Chesterford, and a detailed account of a remarkable discovery of several such shafts sunk in chalk rock at Ewell in Surrey, has recently been communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by Mr. Diamond, and printed in the Archæologia, vol. xxxii. p. 451. Similar "rubbish-holes," containing bones, fragments of pottery, and remains of the most miscellaneous nature, have been noticed by Mr. Trollope in several places near the east gate, Lincoln, a site abounding in vestiges of the Roman age. In connection with these curious remains a passage in the description of ancient Perth, given by Pennant, may well deserve to be noticed. He states that, in the precipitous banks of the river Almond, at its junction with the Tay, the site of the ancient Bertha, where the Romans had a station, antiquities of their times frequently were brought to light by the fall of the cliffs. "Other falls," he observes, "have produced discoveries still more singular, and have laid open a species of interment, as far as I know, hitherto unnoticed. Some years ago in the face of a broken bank, were discovered six pillars in a line, ten feet distance from one another, and eighteen feet high from the top of the ground to the bed of the Almond, shewing out of the bank a semicircular face. These proved to have been the contents of certain cylindrical pits, sunk in the earth as places of sepulture. The urns were placed in them, and the hollows filled in with earth of a different kind from the banks, and so strongly rammed in as to remain coherent, after the former had in part been washed away. The Rev. Mr. Duff has described these hollows in a manner somewhat different, comparing them to the segments of a cone, with the broader end downwards, and to have been filled with bones, ashes, and
- ↑ The store places for grain at the city of Valetta, Malta, made during the rule of the Grand-Masters in that island, consist of deep chambers excavated in the natural rock; the access to each chamber is by one small opening on the surface, which is closed by a stone cover cemented down so as to exclude the air. In these chambers the grain will keep perfectly sound for a length of time; the rock is naturally dry, and the climate remarkably so.
- ↑ Mr. Neville has printed some interesting memorials of his researches in Essex, entitled, "Antiqua Explorata," and "Sepulchra Exposita." Saftron Walden, G. Youngman. 8vo. 1847-48.
