Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/381

] and domestic hog, and in all probability the dog, the bones of the last-named animal being in the same fractured state as those of the rest. Fragments of pottery were also found. The accumulation may be inferred to belong to the late rather than the early Bronze age, from the discovery of a socketed spear-head.

This discovery is of considerable zoological value, since it proves that the urus was living in Britain in a wild state as late as the Bronze age. It must, however, have been very rare, since this is the only case of its occurrence at this period in Britain with which I am acquainted.

The crannoges, or platforms of clay and stone, interlaced with or supported by timber, and based on small shallows or islets in the Irish lakes, have been inhabited from the Bronze age to as late as A.D. 1641. In that year the crannoge in Roughan lake, near Dungannon, afforded shelter to Sir Phelim O'Neill, and it is proved to belong to the former age by the discovery of bronze spear-heads in the old refuse-heaps. In Mr. Kinahan's opinion some of these platforms supported a circular stockade within which the huts of the inhabitants were arranged under one roof common to all, which sloped from the stockade to a courtyard in the centre.

The wooden cabins or huts, constructed of wattles or tempered clay, and the small stone houses, called cloghauns, in which the Irish peasantry have lived within the Historic period, are probably survivals from