which are not collected in urns, but merely surrounded with small stones. Most of the barrows of this period were family-barrows, serving as places of interment for single families. Hence not only may the floor of a barrow be furnished with a great number of urns, or small stone cists filled with bones, but it is also very common, particularly on the east and south sides, and scarcely a foot in depth below the turf, to find numerous urns surrounded with stones which unquestionably have been deposited from time to time. The number of them, often from thirty to seventy, probably results from the circumstance of many poor persons having by degrees deposited their urns in the barrows of the rich. Since cinerary urns are not unfrequently dug up both in open fields and in beds of peat, the poorer classes have probably been obliged to select this simple mode of interment because they had no opportunity of placing the ashes of their relatives in a barrow.
A remarkable barrow with peculiar contents was examined in 1827, at the village of Vollerslev, in the neighbourhood of Aabenraa (Apenrade). On the removal of the earth, on the south side of the barrow, there was found, above the surface of the surrounding field, a small cinerary urn of clay, and below this a heap of small stones, thrown together. On the removal of these, a very thick stem of an oak, about ten feet in length and split in two, was discovered, which was roughhewn and bore the marks of a saw. The upper part was found to be the cover of a cist hollowed out in the oak stem, six feet long, and nearly two broad[1]. In it was found a mantle
- ↑ A similar wooden coffin formed from the trunk of an oak, split in two for the purpose, both parts being of nearly equal capacity, and still retaining the bark upon them, was found a few years since in a tumulus at Gristhorpe, between Scarborough and Filey, and contained the skeleton of what was supposed to be an ancient Briton. With it were found a brass and flint spear-head and flint arrow-heads, a wicker basket, &c., the particulars of which were published in a pamphlet by Mr. William Williamson in 1834. It appears from a passage in the Earl of Ellesmere's very useful "Guide to Northern Archæology" that this discovery and a similar one at Biolderup form the subject of a paper in the Nordisk Tidskrift for Oldkyndighed.—T.
