barrow (Fig. 141). Various articles and implements of daily use were thrown into the fire,[1] and the burnt remains were sometimes placed in the urn with the ashes of the dead. The implements, weapons, and ornaments, enumerated in the list, p. 346, were also interred for use in the world of spirits, together with drinking cups of the type of Fig. 127, and more rarely with curious perforated earthenware vessels (Fig. 128), which probably were used either to carry the sacred fire with which to light the pile, or as censers in the funeral ceremonies; food also was placed for the dead, as well as flakes and splinters of flint. The tumulus or cairn was carefully raised over the urn, and the memory of the dead maintained by periodic feasts, after which either earth or stone was added to the height of the mound or cairn, each feast being represented by a layer of broken and burnt bones of the short-horned ox, horse, sheep or goat, and hog, together with charcoal.
Fig. 141.—Bell-shaped Barrow at Winterslow.
It not unfrequently happens that a barrow or cairn
- ↑ In 1878 Mr. Rooke Pennington and myself obtained an urn out of a cairn on Lose Hill, Castleton, Derbyshire, in which a flint knife had been placed. Its surface was covered with a fine glaze from the fusion of the flint in contact with the alkali in the wood ashes of the funeral fire.
