Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 6.djvu/411

Rh kindness of Mr. Dundas for a drawing and description of this venerable vestige of remote antiquity. ALBERT WAY.

The value of popular tradition will be fully recognised by those who are engaged in Archaeological inijuiries; it must, however, be always received with the utmost caution. It may deserve mention, although a doubt has been expressed as to the existence of such tradition, previously to the discovery being made at Largo, that, as we have been assured, an obscure belief had subsisted amongst the neighbouring peasantry, that in "Norrie's Law" had been deposited a warrior and his steed, placed in an erect position. He was, according to this popular relation, the chief of a great army, and his armour was of massive silver; in the whole host, he alone was armed in that manner.

Singular as this tale may appear, such tradition is not without parallel in the records of our National Antiquities. In the Ashmolean Museum a gold plate is preserved, which was found in the latter part of the seventeenth century near Ballyshannon, solely in consequence of the song of a harper who chanced to come in whilst the Bishop of Derry (Dr. Hopkins) was at dinner. The Bishop, desiring to know the purport of his lay, the herdsman was called in as interpreter, and explained it to be this: That at a certain spot a man of gigantic stature lay buried, his breast and back covered with plates of gold, and large golden rings upon his fingers. On digging at the place, this plate, still to be seen at Oxford, and another were found. Bishop Gibson relates this remarkable incident in his edition of Camden's Britannia. Another striking circumstance of a similar nature has occurred in more recent times. Some years previously to the discovery of the golden corslet at Bryn-yr Ellyllon (the Fairies' or Goblins' Hill), near Mold, in Flintshire, now deposited in the British Museum, an aged woman, returning late from Mold, imagined that she had seen a spectre cross her path to the identical mound where the skeleton encased in gold was subsequently found; she described the phantom as of gigantic size, and clad in a coat of gold, shining like the sun. This she related the next morning to the farmer, whose workmen actually found the corslet in 1833, and there can scarcely be a question that a lingering remembrance of a tradition which she had heard in early years associated with the "Goblins' Hill," presented to this woman's imagination such a golden effigy.

Archaeological research, zealously and successfully prosecuted in the southern part of the Russian empire, in recent times, has been productive of many important results. Some of our readers are, doubtless, acquainted with the discoveries, comprising gold ornaments of the most elaborate and skilful workmanship, brought to light at Kertch, and made known to the archaeologists of Western Europe