much because it shows the persistence of this plan of marking battle-fields at so late a date—later ones have just been quoted—but because all the actors in the scene are familiar to us from the part they took in the transactions in the Orkneys in the tenth century. If they, in their own country, adhered to these old-world practices, we should not be astonished at their having erected circles or buried in mounds in their new possessions. It is true that none of these Scandinavian circles can compare in extent with the Standing Stones of Stennis or the Ring of Brogar, but this would not be the first time that such a thing has happened. The Greeks erected larger and, in proportion to the population, more numerous Doric temples in Sicily than they possessed in their own country; and the Northmen may have done the same thing in Orcadia, where they possessed a conquered, probably an enslaved, race to execute these works.
