Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/298

270 of upright posts and horizontal sleepers, morticed at the angles, the end of each upright post being inserted into the lower sleeper of the frame and fastened by a large block of wood or forelock." The mortices were roughly made with a blunt instrument, the wood being bruised rather than cut; and, oddly enough, a stone celt found in the house (like Fig. 99), according to Captain Mudge, corresponded exactly with the cuts of the tool used in forming the mortices and grooves. The logs had been cut with a larger instrument, also of stone. The house consisted of two stories, one over the other, each four feet high. It stood upon a stratum of bog fifteen feet deep, which had been covered by a layer of hazel bushes, and that by a layer of fine sand, before the building had been begun. On the ground-floor, besides the stone axe above mentioned, there was a grindstone hollowed in the centre by rubbing. "A paved causeway, resting upon a foundation of hazel bushes and birchwood," led to the remains of a fireplace composed of slabs of freestone, at fourteen yards' distance from the house, on which was a quantity of ashes. It appeared to have been surrounded by a staked enclosure. This house and the surrounding woodland growth of bog-willow, ash, and oak, lay buried under a depth of twenty-three feet of peat, the roof of the house being fourteen feet below the surface of the bog. It is the only example of a wooden cabin of the Neolithic age which is on record; and it may be looked upon as a type of one of the forms of habitation where timber was abundant, and where stone was not at hand for building circular or beehive huts, like the Scotch burghs. The huts were probably more