Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/461

] age. The name of the cairn is Bryn-yr-Ellyllon, goblin or fairy hill. The place was supposed to be haunted, and before the discovery was made a spectre was said to have been seen to enter the cairn clad in golden armour. This superstition is merely a survival of the idea so universal among the cairn-builders, in all ages and all countries, that the tomb was the home of the spirit, whence it issued into the upper world.

The practice of burying the dead at full length was first known in Britain in the Prehistoric Iron age, but it did not supersede cremation. The ashes of the dead were interred in megalithic tombs, sometimes of considerable magnitude, sometimes enclosed in a pyramidal mound or cairn. A magnificent group of these is to be seen on the banks of the Boyne near Drogheda, consisting of seventeen large mounds, of which the most important is that of New Grange. It consists of a cruciform sepulchral building, 89 feet long, with transepts 21 feet from end to end, made of large blocks of stone, encased in a truncated cairn 70 feet high, 310 feet in diameter, and surrounded by a circle of large upright stones. The platform at the top is 120 feet across. At the point of the intersection of the transepts with the long passage, the roof rises into a conical dome 20 feet high. In each of the three chambers, forming the head and arms of the cross, was a shallow stone basin from 3 to 3 feet long, and from 6 to 9 inches deep. These stone basins have been proved, by Mr. Eugene Conwell's discoveries at Lough Crew, to have contained the ashes of the dead. The surface of the stones in the chambers