Lyles hill

...'

'. "

.�.

"' \ ,

�.. t

.....� "--.

.T.. ;

'

"",

.

• ;'

""..

.

-!::/,

,.

.' •••L..••

,,

;. . ..

' .. ' . '"

.I, .... .... , �

.

..

" "i:' . ·'V

.. ...

,

' /I r ,,

,. '

,"

. "...

'

" .

. ,�

.

. . .. .. . .......

THE SITE AND

ITS SETTING

The hill is a detached portion of the Tertiary basaltic plateau which rises eastwards from Lough Neagh to fall away suddenly in the great escarpment of Cave Hill over­ looking Belfast (Fig. 2) . I t rises conspicuously above the surrounding farmlands as a detached area of rough grazing (Plates I, II2) and lying exactly mid-way between the north-eastern end of Lough Neagh and the south-western shor$! of Belfast Lough, 6} miles from both, it dominates the " isthmus " which connects mid-Antrim with south Antrim and Down.' This central position as well as its local dominance must have given the site strategic significance in ancient times. The hill commands wide views in all directions. Geologically it is an outlier of the Upper Basalts which have as a rule been preserved only in the higher parts of the Antrim plateau, e.g. Divis, above Belfast ([574 ft.) . In Lyles Hill they form a smooth oval dome some 550 yards in maximum length (from north-west to south-east) and 380 yards in width, culminating towards the south-east in a vague rounded summit (753 ft.) . The grassy dome rises, on all sides, from [50 to 250 feet above the Lower Basalts which, however, rapidly gain height towards the south-east, forming the watershed between the Clady Water and the Ballymartin

Fig.

2.

Lyles

Hill and the Belfast mountains.

(Block loaned by Belfast MUllicipal Museum.)

� Pro ...·o;.sor Stuart Piggott (P.S.A.S. LXXXII (194;-48),63-123) has tentatively identified the late Ncolithic sanctuary on CairnpappJc Hill, West Lothian, with the Media Nemcton (Middle Sanctuary) of the Ravenna Geographer. There is no clear evidence that Lyles Hill was sacred in the Early Iron Age, but the parallel position may be significant. It may be that the site awaits identification in the Irish annals.

., '.

"

Water, parallel streams draining north-westwards into the Six Mile Water and thence into Lough Neagh (Fig. 2). On the western side, towards the lake, the steep-sided hill rises acropolis-like above a drift-covered plain of heavy clays, unsuited for settlement down to the time of the thickly-clustering ring-forts. Northwards, however, patches of sand and gravel would have allowed access to the wide morainic belt of the Six Mile VI/ater valley and to the mid-Antrim hills beyond, while to the south-east a fairly open drift-free route led along the watershed past Boghill and Ballyutoag to the south shoulder of Squire's Hill and the flint supplies of the plateau-edge (Figs. 2 and 3).

The hill is almost free of glacial drift, and its thin soil-cover, now supporting coarse grasses with patches of heather, can never have carried heavy forest growth. The presence of ragwort and the almost complete absence of peaty accumulations are proof of its dryness and suitability' for early settlement.' The (Upper) Basalts, here as elsewhere, are somewhat columnar in structure, so that water sinks in readily along the joints.7 The hill summit must have been a conspicuous landmark before the steep slopes were planted, apparently about a century ago, with a thick ring of trees which, when we began excavations, partly obscured the hill from all sides except the north-west. The woods were devastated by mining activities during the second World War and have �ince been almost completely cleared (Plate I 2) .

Below the 700 ft. contour the smooth hill-top falls away sharply where the Upper Basalts end, and at the foot of the scarp the red interbasaltic layers are exposed. These soft beds, with their aluminous and ferrous ores, range in thickness from 6 to as much as 50 feet, and it is their weathering that has determined the contours of the hill. The iron­ ores were extensively worked during the 1 9th century by means of adits, and extraction of aluminium ores during the last war (1939 to 1945) has greatly disfigured the approaches to the hill without, however, damaging the remains on the hill-top. As we shall see, the builders of the earth-work had utilised the bright-red earth into which the inter­ basaltic rocks weather, and from these or similar beds in the neighbourhood the lignite which we found in certain secondary deposits was probably obtained.

The scarp is steepest-in places precipitous-on the north-east side, where it corre­ sponds to a geological fault with a down throw towards the north. This face, moreover, has been steepened by the waters of a former drainage channel, now dry, which carried the ponded waters of a glacial lake north-westwards during some stage of ice-retreat in late Pleistocene times.'

The earlhwork surrollnding the hill-top, following the crest of the scarp at approximately the 700 feet contour, is pear-shaped, measuring about 950 feet by 700 feet, and enclosing some I2� acres. It has, apparently, in one place on the north-east, been undermined by erosion and carried down the slope. I nvestigation at this point was not attempted owing to a tangle of trees, shrubs, boulders, and a thick carpet of wood-rush and ferns. The stone "'all ,,·hich surrounds the hill-top on three sides follows approximately the line of the earth"'ork, though they coincide only for a short stretch on the south.

The principal line of approach to the hill, both ancient and modern, slants up the north-western face, where it is partly sunk into the rock, and enters the enclosure through a simple gap in the earthwork some 10 yards in width (Fig. J, DI ; PI. II I). There are several small breaks elsewhere in the line of the rampart, but none of them has the C W. B. \\'right Stales (The Ce%c)' of the CountTJ' around Bclfast, A1emoir qj the Gtological SurvCj', 19°+. p. 92) that" bogs of considerable cXI1.:nt and fair thickness appear to have formerly existed at Lyles Hill," but this cannot refer to the

hill itself. '; The t:-ut' columnar uasalts of the Giant's Causcway, however, with their thick flows, arc considered by 1v1r. E. Pultt:rson to belong to a hitherto unrecognised middle series in the sequence of the Antrim pbtcau bvas. b'

Op. (it. (Deol.

J.Jl'1Iwir, 1904)

p. go.

2

:M.

t -N­

BALLYCASTLE

t

1

I

:. . .

.

.. .

:"·1000'

-N-

I

..

.

.

..

.

..

.

......

.

·&ALLYMENA

..<" ,

.

.

("

]0 H.

o

. .:

. .

,

I TEHrurATRICk/ /

.

... .. .

.. ··.soo· ..:

I I I \

"

. soo'

.::':.�.,

....

.

.. .. . .

.. . .

.

......

..

'"

...

.

.

. ...

.

'

.

....

'

\

·······,sOQ·..

... . ....

.-...; -! ...'

-

. . . .. . .

..

. . .. . . ..

.

.

.

3

.. bOO�.. .... . .

...

O' B ERA G NEE

T

. . .

,,-V.:

l'

. . ...

-N-

.. .. : .. : .... .

..

.

.

.

..

. .

".

.. ....

.

_

....

-

9 '-

_

Townlond

Fig. 3.

Boundary

--.:.y.�

_ ____

"'. ....'. " .'" .... ....

:..Y,1

___ _ _ _

HILE

. . ..

\

TO

B£LFAST

. ..

.......... bOO'····

(Based 011 the Ordnal/ce Survey umi reproduced by permission of the Ministry of Finance.)

Location maps of site.

3

appearance of antiquity, and apart from section-cutting, our investigation of the rampart was confined to the northern entrance. There is no fosse : the earthwork takes the form of a low grass-grown bank averaging two to three feet in height and thirty feet in width. It nowhere shows the sharp slopes associated with the well-known ring-fort enclosures, from which it differs also in its great extent and its irregular contour-alignment.

In all probability an outer earthwork runs round part of the hill towards the foot of the scarp at the level of the top of the interbasaltic beds. I n 1 937 I was able to trace its course intermittently along the north and west sides, but it was inconspicuous and difficult to pick out among the trees and the old mine workings. By 1947 much of it had disappeared in the new workings. A fragment remaining on the north side is some 70 yards distant from the main rampart. I t is little more than a foot high and 3 or 4 yards wide, and resembles a degraded hedgebank, but it contains a single upright stone of megalithic proportions and I believe it is ancient. A fragment on the west is, where best preserved, 4 yards wide and 2 feet high. It has not been possible to plan or excavate this outer bank but further reference to it will be made i n the concluding section of this report.

The low grass-grown cairn, roughly circular i n plan, is not set precisely on the summit of the hill but lies some 20 yards to the south : the slope here is in fact so gentle that the highest point of the hill is now formed by the top of one of the kerb-stones which rises 9 ins. above the cairn. I n it a small hole " bored in solid rock one foot above the general surface level " marks the old O.S. triangulation point 753 feet. This quotation from the O.S. Records shows that the surveyors, like generations of antiquarians who must have visited Lyles Hill, did not realise that the low mound was an ancient monument. The Ordnance Survey, in the course of its revised triangulation of Northern Ireland, has recently erected a disfiguring concrete pillar on the cairn. I t is 35.2 feet S.S.W. of the old mark.

The average height of the cairn is little more than 2 ft., its diameter some 70 ft. ; and it has the appearance of a low platform,' quite unlike the high cairns which are commonly found on hill tops. One would naturally assume that the loosely piled upper part of the cairn had been removed at some period, leaving little more than the tightly packed basal boulders which we were to encounter within the kerb, but there is evidence to suggest, as we shall see, that the cairn was not very different a thousand years ago, and I am inclined to think it had never been much higher. It might be supposed that stones were removed from the cairn during the construction of the wall which was erected, after 1 833-it is not shown on the first Ordnance map of that date-around the greater part of the hill-top. The Ordnance surveyors, however, would not have failed to notice and record a conspicuous cairn. Moreover the kerb-stone in which they bored their tri­ angulation mark must have been exposed and presumably marked, then as now, the highest point of the cairn. The surface, however, showed many minor irregularities, especially where cairn stones and boulders were visible at the surface, particularly on the south-east side. Here we found that the cairn base was missing : it had probably been dug out by Dark Age squatters (Fig. 4). Near the centre, a shallow basin-like depression of smooth turf marked the site of what proved to be a large primary cist-grave wi thou t cover.

Nine irregularly spaced orthostatic kerb-stones of basalt were visible on the east side, forming an arc some three yards in from the edge of the cairn. Their number was increased to 15 as we uncovered during excavation six intermediate uprights whose tops were found immediately beneath the turf. They had no socket-holes, their bases resting on the dark-coloured floor which underlay the cairn. This orthostatic kerb extends for a distance

, I , I I ; I ,

I

I,

q

H

I I

I II

I

1 I

I I!

J I'

I\ "

II '

;

I •.

I

II� .

If

�

Tht

ca:flI

was restored after excavation to approximately the Jorm it had before work began.

4

" ,

.,

.

..

.

,'

'.

of 42 feet only, that is for one-third of the circumference. I n the north-western segment a similar length of kerb, but of smaller stones, different in construction and entirely buried, was uncovered by excavation, while the south side, again for a distance of 42 feet, had no kerb. In view of the disturbance which had taken place in this sector, however, no significance can be attached to the absence of a kerb. I n fact the orthostatic kerb may once have been continued towards the south, where two biggish boulders (2 I ins. by 1 8 by 1 6, and 36 ins. by 18 by 12) lying just beneath the surface look like displaced members ; but in the absence of socket-holes this is incapable of proof. The probability is that the megalithic kerb originally embraced about half the circumference of the cairn-core, but I think there may always have been a break in the kerb on the south side, where the black basal layer to be described later extended as far as the edge of the mound.

The most remarkable feature of the orthostatic kerb was a miniature dummy entrance in sill-and-jamb construction on the eastern side. This was not evident when excavation began, because the sill and the northern jamb were sloping outwards and lay concealed under the turf (sce plan, Fig. 4). The jambs are tolerably well-matched stones, respectively 26 ins. and 28 ins. high, while the sill is a flat slab measuring 21 ins. by 15, and 7 ins. thick. On lifting the sill back into its original position I noticed on its outer face faint geometrical engravings which will be discussed later. When drawings and photographs had been taken the stone was removed to Belfast Museum, where it is now exhibited (Fig. 10 and Pi. VI 3) .

None of the orthostats of the kerb measured more than 3 ft. 9 ins. in total height.

I t is significant that two of the largest, both protruding some 1 8 ins. above the turf, were placed one on either side of the jambs, in positions corresponding to the enlarged uprights flanking the portals of some " horned " megalithic burial chambers.lO The asymmetrical position of the dummy entrance in the kerb, which at first sight recalls the lopsided forecourts of many of the Ulster horned cairns, may in fact be due to the destruction of the south end of the kerb referred to above. The kerb on the west, as has been said, was entirely hidden beneath the cairn, but it seems to me probable that the tops of some of the orthostats of the megalithic kerb were always visible.

10 Cr. tbe long.destr oyed monument at Annacloghmullin, Co. Armagh; also Doey's Cairn, Dunloy (U.J.A. 1(1938) 59 78).

5

o

[!

-

PITS, 1

-

8

' _ :..::.--.,;:.. ...._ ....:. . _�._�,.�--.:n�-2" FEET

---

----

Fig. 4.

Plan of cairn, Lyles Hill. Secondary cists are marked Secondary 1, S2 and S3. Two shallow pits are unnumbered.

6

..

5

EXCAV ATION The excavated areas are marked on the plan (Fig. I) . c..�....�r< ." 3 y Seven sections were cut through the earthwork, and in addition to an extensi'·e examina­ tion of the entrance (DI) a slightly raised area just inside the entrance (D2) was sectioned. Apart from the cairn the only other area within the earthwork which obviously called for examination was the neighbourhood of three rock outcrops situated some 120 yards N.N.vV. of the cairn. Here two low mounds of earth had been thrown up by rabbits.

A break of slope at this point probably marks the edge of a minor lava-flow, and the weathering of a thin lithomarge bed would account for the accumulation of reddish earth. Some flint flakes, a chip off a polished blue-stone axe and a few scraps of Neolithic pottery (Fig. 26, 25-27) were picked up in the rabbit scrapes, but nothing further was revealed by trenches (D4) . The sections showed 1 0 inches of humus, another 1 0 inches of red-brown earth containing bits of charcoal, and 9 inches of brown subsoil resting on rock. The area was so tunnelled with rabbit burrows that further excavation was considered likely to be useless. A similar area of slightly raised ground situated about 120 yards W.N.W. of the cairn (D3) was more carefully examined and will be described later: here again much disturbance had been occasioned by rabbits. The 6-inch Ordnance Survey map (er. Fig. 3, 3) marks Lyles Hill as a rabbit warren, and rabbits are still very plentiful.

A slight elevation at D5, 30 yards north of the cairn, proved to mark the buried right­ angle junction of two rows of stones, two feet wide, having the appearance of dry-wall foundations. There were no associated finds. The humus was thin, and rock appeared at a depth of 10 inches. These walls may be part of a summer-house which is known to have been erected by the Templctowns, former owners of Lyles Hill. It is said to have stood, however, on the very top of the hill and to have been constructed of timber and glass, though it probably had stone footings. Another possible site for the summer-house is a raised area immediately east of the cairn. Here, beginning 1 6 feet from the kerb, a straight line of large stones was found to extend eastwards for 14 feet, ending in a right­ angled corner. It was set in very dark soil in which a fragment of iron was discovered.

The covering humus was only 5 or 6 inches thick. Traces of burnt bone were observed in the dark soil, so that this deposit is probably connected with the cairn, but wc were so fully occupied during our time on the hill that further excavation here was not at­ tempted.

I n addition several test trenches were opened casually over the hill-top: rock was everywhere reached at depths of from 6 to 1 2 inches. These trenches rarely failed to yield charcoal, a sherd or two of Neolithic pottery and a few flints. Immediately north of the cairn, in particular, habitation material was plentiful and the sherds in the old humus were noticeably small and worn, but all our time had to be given to the cairn and we were unable to extend the excavation i n this direction.

••

THE CAIRN Two trenches intersecting at right angles were first cut through the cairn, the trial trench b';ng taken westwards, approximately," from the dummy portal. The first sod cut had several Neolithic sherds clinging to its underside, and worked flints and fragments 11

For convenience wc have regarded the top of the plan as being the north·point in our descriptions.

7

•

t

I l

of cremated bone soon made their appearance. Thereafter, especially as we reached the lower levels of the trenches, there was scarcely a single trowel-full of earth without its accompanying sherds and flints. This embarrassing abundance continued throughout the excavation of the cairn. We had to deal with tens of thousands of finds.

The four quadrants were excavated a square yard at a time, the material being removed in two stages in order to distinguish between objects lying above and below the sealing layer of tightly packed boulders. Important finds were precisely recorded by means of co-ordinates and depths below the surface, but in general we had to be content with labelling finds as coming from a particular square. Finds from below the boulders were divided into those from the black layer and those from the dark grey (old humus) layer which was generally present below it.

T H E K ERB The visible orthostatic kerb and its dummy portal have been described above. The buried kerb on the west was composed of small, thin uprights averaging 1 8 ins. in height, the taller of the slabs leaning out at a considerable angle. On the north side, where it joined the megalithic kerb, recumbent slabs occupied the spaces between the uprights, closely interlocking so that they cannot be interpreted as fallen uprights: Four deep-set recumbent stones, the largest measuring 4 ft. 6 ins. by I ft. thick, were found outside the kerb on the west, placed two on either side of a single upright slab which stood outside the kerb (Plate Ill) . · The arrangement may not be fortuitous, but we could see no explanation of the large recumbents other than as buttresses.12 The spaces between them and the kerb were carefully packed with small stones. Similar packing stones supported the kerb on all sides, and small boulders, with an occasional large one, covered most of the floor outside the kerb to the edge of the mound.

T H E BOU LDER- C ORE Inside the kerb a well-constructed core or platform of large basalt boulders, some 38 ft. in diameter, was exposed when we had dug through the top 9 ins. or so of soil and loose stones (Plate Ill) . The boulders measured up to a foot in diameter and were so inter­ locked that it was very difficult to remove them from above. There were two layers of boulders in some parts, bu t the average depth of the " core " was never far from one foot. The interstices were filled with soft, dark-brown soil of even consistency which had probably infiltrated from above (Sections, Fig. 5) .

THE CENTRAL GRAVE The boulder-core was absent in two places. One break, probably due to Dark Age disturbance, has been mentioned above : the other-the only original break-was at the centre of the cairn, where a circular grave had been constructed. Here, when we began work, ,,·as a very shallow depression of smooth turf some six feet across. It was found to be lined on the western side by an arc of six upright stones, the tallest of them 1 8 ins. high, whose tops lay a few inches under the grass. On the other sides a ring of loose dark earth, backed by the curving i nner edge of the boulder-platform, presumably marked the sites of pillaged uprights which would have completed the walls of a circular graye about 3! feet in internal diameter. This was neatly paved with thin slabs, � in. to 2 ins. thick, forming a kind of crazy-paving which lay at a depth of 2 0 ins. below the surface (Plate I V)' The edge of the pavement was intact where it articulated with the sun·iying wall of the grave, but on the south side one of the thin slabs, tilted at an angle of 600, afforded clear evidence of disturbance. The pavement was bedded directly on a soft black layer which extended southwards under the core almost as far as its limits.

1�

They arc not comparable to the thrust·blocks found by Fox on onc side of the Simondston cairn

(193j). 129.,80).

8

(Arch.

LXXXJ'l/

5

0 !

SECTION

5

10

FEET

/

A

/'

/'

/'

/

\/<.�:.��;':';1 PSi{g [IIlIIlIlll

SECTION o

2

.J

FEET

TOPSOIL CAIRN STONES BROWN EARTH

DARK GREY FLOOR SUBSOIL BASALT

� 111111111 -

!

wO'"

BLACK LAYER SOUTH

NORTH '-0

SECTION

C

SECTION D

SEC E

5

.?

f

I? FEET

S.W .;�� N[

LYLES HILL

P!T 5 I

EAST

0

I

t J

..

� FHT

SEC

NW�� .

S[

F

C A C H£

f'IT b

Fig.

5.

Cairn sections

A-F

(see Fig. 4).

CAIRN

SECTIONS

There was no evidence that the cist had ever been roofed. It may have had a cor belied covering, but if so all trace of the roofing slabs had gone. The two large stones im足 mediately lO the west marked in outline on the plan (Fig. 1), the larger of them measuring 31 ft. by 2 ft. hy 1 ft. thick, were in fact bedded directly on the black layer and therefore cannot be displaced roof-slabs. I regarded them as buttresses for the wall of the cist, but it may be significant that they occur only on the side opposite the dummy entrance, and also in approximate line with the large horizontal slabs found outside the kerb on the west.

The upper foot of the filling of the grave (Fig. 5, section B) contained few finds, but the 8 inches of dark stony earth lying above the pavement yielded manv scattered pieces of burnt bone, amounting in all to three handfuls, together with several Keolithic sherds and two sherds of an unusual ribbed food-vessel (Fig. 18, 90). These were found at depths of 1 3 to 15 ins. immediately above the tilted paving-slab, on the south-west side of which a pocket of soft brown earth containing one small coarse sherd (Fig. 16, 76) went down to bedrock 8 inches below the pavement. This sherd is probably an intruder, and . the difficulty is to decide whether the fine food-vessel fragments are also secondary or whether they should be regarded as primary. Two small fragments of what is almost certainly the same vessel came from the surface of the cairn 9 yards to the south, having probably been thrown out at some period. From my observations and from Professor Walmsley's report I a m inclined to regard the cremated bones-which were those of a child-as primary. Flints from the cremation layer confirm this view.

They include a fine hollow scraper (Fig. 21, 42), an arrowhead (Fig. 20, 1 ) and, resting on the black layer between two paving stones, a quartz core. It is possible that the highly ornate food-vessel fragment was also a primary deposit, a special offering lO the young person for whom the cairn was probably built. The complete absence of sherds of food足 vessel type from the basal layer of the cairn makes this view improbable, but it is certainly not impossible. 'Ve return to this question in discussing the finds.

Professor Walmsley's report on the bones follows : " All the fragments are human: I can see nothing that resembles animal bone. There are parts of the skull, limb bones and foot bones: and from their size, the open condition of the skull sutures and the unclosed epiphysis of the proximal phalanx of the little toe I conclude the remains to be those of a young person, say 1 2 to 1 6 years of age. The burning is even and complete, more so than in those fmm the black layer (see below) , but the condition of the bones is not much different, and it is probable that the same form of incineration was used. But these remains probably represent an entire and separate burial. The condition of the bones i, not that found with a cinerary urn interment but resembles more what I have come to associate with earlier burials. On the other hand the thoroughness and evenness of the burning is in contrast with the uneven burning of the few certain megalithic in足 cinerations I have seen, in which, often enough, parts of the same bone are burnt to different degrees."

These observations on the bones, made without knowledt:e of the circumstances under which they were found. lend support to the excavator's view that the deposits in the central cist are of the <ame age as the <caltered bones found in the basal layer of the cairn, on which a report will be giyen later.

THE C A I R N -FL O O R The black layer mentioned earlier was most conspicuous over an area measuring some 14 feet by 1 1, and obviously marked the si te of an extensive fire. Over it the boulders of the basal platform were especially well-laid. They had been placed directly on its fresh unconsolidated surface, so that under them the deposit thinned in hollows which made a cupped pattern ",hen the SlOnes were lifted out. The black layer had a maximum 10

'I

_

• !.

thickness of i ins . : it was heavily impregnated with charcoal and burnt hazel nuts, and when first uncovered had a wet spongy appearance. It was almost impossibly sticky to handle in wet weather, but it dried out as dusty ashen material containing much comminuted charcoal, burnt splinters of stone, small fragments of burnt bone and an abundance of sherds, flints and other relics.

It thinned out fairly sharply at the edges. It was present, as wc have seen, under the pavement of the cist, where it averaged only I! ins. in thickness. The cist had been placed at the northern end of the black layer, though the exact agreement between pavement­ edge and the end of the layer is probably due to the disturbance caused by the partial destruction of the grave. Underneath the black layer, especially towards its centre, the upper two inches of the thin subsoil-normally brown in colour--overlying the basalt, were reddened with heat. In this central part of the black layer, over an area some four feet in diameter, the boulders of the cairn-core were considerably smaller than average.

It would seem that, whether for ritualistic reasons or because the fires were still hot, there had been no trampling of the black layer, which was presumably sealed by laying the boulders inwards towards the centre. A well-fitting floor could have been secured only by selecting smaller boulders to fill the final gap.

Under most of the boulder core the black layer gave way to a dark grey layer resembling original humus, over which lay a discontinuous black layer rarely exceeding I inch in thickness and often consisting of a mere charcoal spread. We have distinguished it from the thick black layer on the plan (Fig. 4) and we may think of it as a spread from the main pyre. That there were other contributory fires, however, was evident from the occurrence of several patches of heat-reddened earth under the thin black layer. In some parts this ran up to, and in two places on the north side extended underneath the kerb, the stones of which were there bedded on it. On the south side it ran in two arms well beyond the limits of the boulder platform, as far as the edge of the cairn.

The dark grey horizon averaged four inches in thickness and normally rested on a few inches of rubbly brown subsoil, but in places lay directly on the uneven basalt which was often discoloured, red and black. Occasional fragments of charcoal were recovered from the grey layer, and there were some charcoal patches underneath it, resting on the sub-soil (Fig. 5, Section A). The old ground surface had evidently been considerably disturbed both before and during the preparation of the burial site.

In one place, south-cast of the cist, the rock had been weathered to a depth of 21 feet in a circular hollow six feet across. The old humus ran over it, concealing the bright reddish pebbly contents. It was devoid of finds and has no archaeological significance, but it is of some interest as a phenomenon of basalt-weathering. Such pockets of dis­ integrated rock may have supplied some of the red material for the earthwork, though this could have been obtained in quantity only from the interbasaltic horizon surrounding the hill.

Both the thick black layer and the dark grey floor were exceptionally rich in finds.

Almost every square yard yielded scores of worked flints and sherds, the latter typically occurring in pockets containing fragments of several different vessels. In no instance were there sufficient sherds to reconstruct a complete vessel, and most pots are represented by a few sherds only. The preponderance of rims is striking, even allowing for the higher survival rate of rims of cooking pots as compared with bases. On the whole the pots are so well made that the percentage of error i n isolating rims from different pots is likely to be small, and my rough count of the number of different rims from the cairn cannot be far wrong: it is 1,000. I cannot think that the pot bases would have disinte­ grated completely in a normal habitation layer. The evidence points to a selection of those parts of domestic vessels which had survived in large fragments in rubbish dumps 11

and which were easiest to pick up. My impression as excavating was that baskets full of refuse had been dumped on the ground around the pyre and selected handfuls thrown into it.

There must have been, it is admitted, intensive occupation in the vicinity of the cairn, and it has been suggested to me that the abundant relics can be satisfactorily explained by the fact that the cairn was erected on an inhabited site. The evidence will not allow so simple an explanation. Admittedly, as shown by the excavation of site D3 (see p. 27) the simple hearth-shelters would have left little trace, but nothing short of pro­ longed habitation on the site would be required to accumulate the prodigious numbers of sherds and flints found under the cairn. Yet the finds are singularly uniform, to the point of monotony : there was no stratification and nowhere was there any sign of a built hearth. No post-holes were found, and there was no trace of food-refuse save for the few burnt animal bones which are best interpreted as offerings.

The fires must be regarded as ritual hearths and funerary pyres, and the rites evidently included the offering of" shards flints and pebbles " on a scale which the well-known reference in Hamlet but faintly echoes." Habitation refuse from sites within the enclosure, and possibly from a wider area, was presumably carried as offerings to the burial site.

At the same time it seems certain that many sherds and flints were incorporated accidently during the erection of the cairn. We return to this question when discussing the distri­ bution of flints.

Many of the best flint artifacts as well as a rich assortment of potsherds came from the edge of the thick black layer, and they nearly all showed signs of heat. It is significant that there were very few finds in the centre of the black layer: objects thrown into a burning pyre would tend to fal l towards its periphery. Further, the sherds from the black layer were remarkably fresh-looking, with clean fractures and no worn edges, as though large portions of pots had been broken in the act of casting them into the fire.

I t was noticeable on the other hand that most of the sherds from above the boulder-core -and some of those from the grey floor-were much worn and fragmentary. I conclude that these had been i ncorporated accidentally from old habitation layers adjacent to the cairn.

Occasionally we were able to join broken potsherds, and even broken flints, found several yards apart, and it also proved possible in a few cases to join sherds from above and below the boulder-platform, though it is necessary to add that no fragment of any Bronze Age ware and no flat bases were recovered from the lower layer. It seems probable, from the quantities of sherds and flints above the boulders, that the offering of household refuse went on after the boulders had been laid down. One of the greenstone pendants, lOO (Fig. 2}, 73) came from the upper part of the cairn, as did several of the broken polished axes.

Care had been taken, whether from motives of prudence or ritual avoidance, not to tread on the thick black layer south of the cist which marked the site of the main pyre.

But the thin black layer was evidently well trodden. This could be most easily detected when it overlay reddened earth, for patches of red were mingled with the charcoal to 13 Cr. the following report of ritual burning following a gipsy burial at Garsington, Oxford, on June 12, 1953: "A caravan belonging to r..'lrs. Harriet Bowers, the" mother" of a clan of 400, was burned, her two horses were killed, and her crockery was smashed. The Romanies believc that this is necessary to prc\'Cnt the return of the dead person's spirit.

All Mrs. Bowers·s po�elosions wcre put inside the c.aravan and burned. Finally the crockery was smashed and this, with tbe iron framework of thc caravan, was buried." The Times, Jan. 13, 1953.

Irish funeral customs and wakes, too, probably reflect many aspects of prehistoric ritual. ''''hethcr or not the wake­ candles, as has been suggestcd, arc a dim relic of cremation pyres, the offerings of plates and IObacco pipes on graves must bc regarded as surl"ivais of ancicnt practice. They may still be seen in certain old graveyards in the west of Ireland, c.g. Achill Island.

12

aw" :,." ,

produce a hard mottled layer. The mottling was specially noticeable in the neighbour足 hoor! of the megalithic kerb, the erection of which would have involved a good deal of trampling. It occurrer! also around onc of the pits which \\'e describe below. (:--<0 . 7).

THE PITS In several places the pot-bearing floor was found to dip down to the rock in excavated hollows or pits. They are numbered I-8 on the plan. Pits I to 5 occur on the margin of the thick black deposit, where also there were two shallow depressions not sufficiently well-defined to be called pits. They arc marked on the plan but not numbered. Pits 6 and 7 are in the northern sector of the cairn core, while No. 8 is situated beyond the northern kerb under the edge of the mound. The pits show considerable variation in size and may have served different purposes, but I am unable to offer any convincing suggestions as to their practical use and must regard them as having had a ritual function.

Pit I. Diameter of mouth, I ft. 6 ins. by 13 ins.: depth, 6 ins., going down to the rock at a depth of 2 ft. 4 ins. below the grass. The infilling of dark earth, unstratified, contained a trace of burnt bone and a few flint chips but no sherds. The thick black layer completely scaled the mouth of the pit, which had, therefore, been filled before the fires were lit (Fig. 5, Sec. C) .

Pit 2. A small hole, diameter 10 ins. by 8, dug down to the rock through 6 ins. of subsoil. The dark filling contained a scatter of burnt bone fragments and a typical"Lylcs Hill " sherd with fluted rim. This pit lay on the edge of the black layer, which partly overlay it.

Pit 3. A larger hole, 2 ft. in diameter and I ft. deep. In its dark filling were many crumbly sherds, much worn or burnt: the charcoal layer was again unbroken over its mouth.

Pit 4. A circular hole, diameter I ft., depth 6 ins., filled with dark earth containing typical sherds and a trace of bone.

Pit 5. This lay just outside the heavy boulder core, in an indentation along its southern margin. It was sunk into the rock to a depth of 6 ins. In the. absence of large boulders the mouth (2 ft. 6 ins. by 2 ft.) was scaled with small stones. The dark infilling contained much charcoal, a trace of burnt bone and pieces of three or four different shouldered pots (Fig. 5, Section E, Fig. 12, 9.)

Pit 6. North of the central cist. It measured 2 ft. by I ft. 6 ins. at the mouth, and had a depth of 9 ins. Dark irrfilling with sherds. Thin charcoal layer over, in which the massive cairn-base was bedded (Fig. 5, Section F) .

Pit i. This consisted of a large oval depression, 6 ft. by 2 ft. 6 ins., dug down to the rock floor through 9 ins. of subsoil. I t was filled with dark earth containing many stone chips, sherds and flints, most of them heat-cracked. The mouth of the hole was levelled with small stones set in mottled red-black material which appeared to have been scraped from the surrounding surface, where the thin black layer was hard and had evidently been trodden into the reddened floor. This pit must be put in a different category from the others not only on account of its shape but because it was closed after the fires had died down. It also lacked the bits of burnt bone which characterize most of the other pits. Similar depressions in the causewayed camps of South England have been described as cooking-pits. At Hembury," Devon, they ranged from 3 to 5 feet in diameter and from I to 3 feet in depth, and contained dark fillings with charcoal, ash, sherds and fragments of calcined bone (unidentifiable). Flint flakes and implements abounded in and around the pits.

1"

Dorothy

M.

Liddcll, Proc. Devon

Arch.

E'J:plor. Soc. 1931: 98-120.

13

Pit 8. This lay some i feet outside the kerb on the north, and measured 1 6 ins. across and 8 ins. deep. I ts dark filling contained several flints, including a lozenge'3haped arrowhead with tip missing (Fig. 20, 1 2) and pieces of four plain vessels (cr. Fig. 12, 8) together with a trace of burnt bone, some charcoal and carbonised hazel shells. The mouth of the pit was scaled by a hard brown layer continuous with the grey floor of the cairn.

These pits were apparently used for their mysterious purpose and filled in before the charcoal spread covered them. (Pit 7, indeed, must also have been partly filled, otherwise the mottled layer would not have been confined to its mouth : I regard it as a disused cooking-pit). Yet, if the pits were used in some preparatory ritual, we have to explain the presence in them of fragments of burnt bone. These were too small for identification but Professor ''''almsley considered some of them to be human and others probably human.

He adds that they arc not completely burnt, an observation which he made on most of the bones from the black layer under the cairn and wh.ieh may well be associated with pyre-incineration. The occurrence in Pit 8 of hazel shells, which were abundant in the black layer under the cairn, likewise suggests that pits and pyre are approximately contemporaneous, though Pit 8 is removed from the main group of pits. These appear to be placed deliberately around the edge of the pyre. They would seem to have been dug to define the limits of the pyre and then filled in, perhaps with token sacred material brought from earlier cremation sites. I n this connexion it should be observed that the sherds found in the pits were all of the plain shouldered pottery (my Group I , see p. 32) which was the traditional Neolithic ware in Ulster. It is iust conceivable that the pits held the bases of wooden posts supporting a platform on which the bodies were placed, that the posts collapsed into the fire and that the holes were filled with offerings during the process of cremation but before the accumulation of the black layer which sealed their mouths. The shallow pockets marked but not numbered on the plan, Fig. 4, on the western side of the cairn, would complete the ring of " pits." They were, however, even less fitted than the numbered pits to hold posts.

During recent years a great number of similar pits has been reported both from Ireland and Great Britain, without, be it said, throwing much light on their purpose. Some parallels are quoted in the discussion at the end of this paper. Here we need onlv notice that such pits are characteristic of burial and ceremonial sites of the late Neolithic and early Bronze Ages, and that they seem to have been associated with preparatory rites.

C R EMATION S W I T H O U T C ISTS

An unusual feature of the site was the occurrence a t all levels of small fragments of burnt bone, often consisting of a mere trace or stain. ''''e distinguish this general scatter of bone from the " secondary " concentrations which occurred in pockets above the boulder-core, though as we shall see most if not all of these must have been deposited not long after the cairn's construction.

We are now concerned with the scatter of minute bone fragments through the body and floor of the cairn : and in order to eliminate all doubt as to their age we shall confine ourselves in the first place to those found under the boulder core. Professor ''''almsley's report on a collection, amounting to a small handful, from the thick black layer south足 west of the central cist follo\\'s : " Most of the fragments are too small to be identified, but I was able to separate them into two groups by differences in their texture and condition. In one group, the fragments of which are less completely burnt, I was able to recognise parts of the occipital region of the skull, metacarpals, and phalanges of a human skeleton, and in the second group, the fragments of which are completely burnt, there is a tri'luetral carpal bone of a pig. There are also two fragments of a lower limb bone of a small bird."

14

. .$t' t

A collection of bones from a concentration on the north-western edrre of the thick black /aver, to the west of the grave-an area rich in finds of all kinds � including two stone beads, arrowheads, bits of polished axes and many sherds,-" contains mostlv human fragments but also some burnt animal bones. The human fragments show the grey colour of incomplete burning. I can recognise among them the head of an adult radius and parts of an adult skull." The majority of the bones from the black laver, however, are too small to be recognisable, and in addition countless powdery fragments could not be recovered.

Burnt animal bones as well as human bones, some well-burnt and some incompletely burnt, were also found scattered through the surface layers of the mound and in areas adjacent to it.lS An interesting group comes from a charcoal layer (oak and willow/poplar) resting on undisturbed soil q inches below the surface 4 yards beyond the limit of the mound on the south-east, but presumably contemporaneous with the cairn. " The fragments of this packet are well burnt and among them I was able to identify only the hamatum and capitum of the right carpus of a red deer, and one of the metacarpo­ phalangeal sesamoids of a red deer. The finding of the deer sesamoid makes it certain that the limbs were burnt while entire: there was no stripping of the limbs before their burning." It is doubtful whether we should attach much significance to this interesting comment in view of the location of the find outside the cairn. It may represent merely an unwanted deer's leg cast into a casual fire, but on the other hand it fits into the general picture of ritual burnt offerings on the site. And human cremations occurred elsewhere around the edge of the cairn, for instance a bone deposit was found outside the kerb immediately beneath the northern edge of the mound (Fig. 4, I) ) . Here cremated material, sufficient to fill a sugar-basin, occurred in a pocket of dark soil, 9 inches thick, and 2 feet 3 inches in diameter, extending under the mound's edge at depths of from 9 to 20 inches below the sloping turf. There were patches of heat-reddened soil both below and above. Professor Walmsley writes, " The bones include the same two types of samples, completely and incompletely burnt fragments, which I have noticed in other burials from the site. I consider the character of the burning to be different from that in mid­ Bronze Age cist-burials. Among the well-calcined bones are parts which are probably female bones." What distinguishes this deposit from the bones found under the cairn is its concentration. Presumably other cremations had been scattered in the process of levelling the floor of the cairn, though there were small concentrations, as wc have seen, in the thick black layer, which had not been interfered with.

Of the bone fragments scattered through the upper layers of the cairn, both in the topsoil and in the fine earth among the boulders, Professor Walmsley writes : " Most of the fragments are adult human bones ; I can recognize parts of a skull, limb-bones and a well-worn molar tooth ; the incineration is complete. There arc also some burnt animal bones, among them bones from the lower parts of limbs of deer." Of fragments gathered from the southern part of the cairn he writes : " The majority are not recog­ nizable, but some are probably human. There is also the fully burnt lunate carpal bone (If a pig." Of others from the eastern part the report reads : " about onc-quarter of the fragments are well-calcined adult human bones ; some of the others are not human, but they are equally well-burnt." A collection, a handful in all, made in the central area east of the cist is described as follows : " About one quarter of the fragmr.nts are well calcined adult human bones ; I am able to recognize parts of the skull vault, the glenoid fossa for the lower jaw, part of the shaft of the humerus, and two phalanges.

1 '; The presence of burnt animal bones in cists with Bronze Age cremations has been recorded in Ireland, most re­ cently at Letterkeen, Co. Mayo. A probable crematorium trench with associated pits was also found, O'Riordain and MacDcrmott, P.R.!...!. LIV ( [ 952) 89-[ [g,

15

r

Three fragments arc not human bones, but I am unable to recognize their source ; they are as well burnt as the human bones."

It is difficult to account for this scatter of cremated material through the upper layers of the cairn. It may represent a deliberate scattering on the analogy of the sherds and artifacts which turned up in all parts of the cairn and at all levels, but while these could be obtained from nearby habitation floors, one can hardly suppose that burnt human and animal bones would be readily available. It would appear that separate cremations had taken place over a fairl\' wide area around the cairn : some of these may well be older than the construction of the cairn. 110reover burials were made in the cairn, apparenLly by incineration ill situ after the boulder platform had been laid down. Most of these, perhaps all, are secondary only in this sense : no long interval of time can have separated them from the primary burials under the cairn.

The " secondaries " occurred for the most part in the neighbourhood of the central cist, in an almost continuous layer of dark earth about I foot thick extending southwards for I Q feet. (Fig. 4, I I ) . This horizon was sealed by a layer of stones lying directly below the turf, but this did not appear to be intentional : there were signs of disturbance and the stones may well have been thrown here by Dark Age squatters or treasure-seekers.

The greatest concentration occurred in an area partly overlying one of the ritual pits (Pit I ) . Here a cremation pocket lay directly on the boulders of the cairn-core (Fig. 5, Section C), which were. splintered and reddened by heat. Clearly the cremation had taken place ill situ. The deposit measured three feet in diameter and contained, besides burnt earth and charcoal (oak) numerous Neolithic sherds and about two handfuls of bones. The report states : " Most of them are human, including fragments of a skull : they are not completely burnt and some carry marks of charring. There is one part of a limb bone of a bird, and other fragments, completely burnt, are probably animal bones."

No long interval of time can have separated this burial from those below the boulders.

I t would appear that the position of the underlying pit was known-Pit 3 also had cremations over it-but this is hardly conceivable since it was covered both by the cairn足 floor and by the boulders. ''''hat is clear is that special importance was attached, as in the primary rites, to the area south of the central cist. W'hile the presence of Neolithic sherds does not, on this site, serve to date the cremation, the absence of later wares is more significant. One sherd, indeed (Fig. 17, 84) may betray a Bronze Age tradition in its coarse paste, but we shall see that coarse ware may well be late Neolithic on this si te, and the presence of a raised shoulder seems to link the sherd with the normal Neolithic shouldered ware. Further, the inclusion of burnt animal bones argues for a direct link with the primary incinerations.

The cremation overlying Pit :1 was separated by 6 inches of dark soil from another cremation pocket immediatelv above. Both were lined with reddened earth over an area some three feet across. The bones ran together at the edges and were continuous with others scattered over a considerable area between the pit and the central cist, amounting in all to t\\'o handfuls. The report reads : " Adult human bones of two kinds, the first kind completeh' burnt and soft in texture, the other much harder and l ess com足 pletely burnt. The latter have been subiected to a less intensive but yet even burning. .

I would rather consider them an i mperfect form of the first kind of burning than from a Bronze Age cist burial. Among the fully burnt bones I can recognize parts of radius and tibia, and these are probablv female bones."

Another group of bones, amounting to two large handfuls, turned up immediately to the west of the cist, directly' under the surface. " The bones are imperfectly burnt.

Among the:ll is t he supraorbi tal region of an adult male : they are associated with 16

large pieces of charcoal " (oak) . Professor Walmsley was inclined to link the presence of big charcoal lumps with the imperfect incineration. They may, indeed, be marginal to the cremation above Pit I , and the absence of an underlying red layer may be ex足 plained in this way, but my impression was that they had been thrown up from the area of disturbance on the southern edge of the cist. I t is at any rate clear that repeated cremations were made in situ, mainly or entirely to the south-south-east of the cist, after the primary incinerations and the construction of boulder-platform and cist, and that they were separated by no long intervals of time. A possible upper limit is provided by a tiny fragment of beaker ware (Fig. IB, 87) found just below the turf alongside the cremation to the west of the cist, but apart from the facts that this was the only beaker sherd from Lyles Hill and that none occurred below the boulders no firm conclusions can be drawn from its presence in an area of disturbance.

Two further series of cist-Iess cremation burials remain to be described, one series on the southern margin of the mound and the other on the northern. On the south were five pockets of dark soil and charcoal accompanied by !lints and Neolithic sherds and in two cases by burnt bones (Fig. 4, I ll ) . The outermost overlav the small stones of the cairn-base a foot from the surface and measured a foot across and 2 inches thick. One of the sherds is quite unlike the normal Neolithic ware and is related to a group of very coarse sherds found immediately above the brown subsoil below 9 inches of humus about 6 yards to the east, beyond the limits of the cairn (Fig. 17, 77) . Although there was no reddened earth associated with this cremation I formed the opinion that it is another early " secondary " : the coarse sherd (see later) may well be late Neolithic. Professor Walmsley notes that the bone fragments, of which only about 20 were sufficiently well preserved to be recovered, include part of the well-calcined crown of a tooth, probably that of a pig. The report continues : "Among the fragments, which are completely burnt, there are parts of the petrous temporal bone, the glenoid fossa of the temporal bone, ribs, and upper end of the humerus of an adult human skeleton." The charcoal was identified as hazel and willow/poplar.

Four feet to the north were four similar pockets of dark earth, averaging 9 inches by 1 2 in area and 6 inches in thickness, aligned over a distance of two yards along the edge of the mound at a depth of 1 6 inches. Three of these were barren but one had, in addition to !lints and normal Neolithic sherds, a scatter of burnt bones on its surface. Professor Walmsley writes : " The only recognizable part is half a tooth which I consider to be a human front premolar." The charcoal was hazel.

Finally, a similar series of little pockets of dark soil with hazel charcoal was found extending for a distance of 7 feet along the opposite margin of the mound, among and under the stones of the upper cairn at depths of 6-1 2 inches (Fig. 4, IV) . In these pockets and also scattered around them were many fragments of at least two coarse-textured vessels which would, a short while ago, have been unhesitatingly assigned to the latest Bronze Age (Fig. 17, 78) . None the less I believe that the pockets of dark earth are of older date, for they contained many fragments, amounting to a small handful, of bones which are described as being human and incompletely calcined, resembling many others from proved primary and early secondary deposits on the site. The coarse vessels might be interpreted as casual relics, possibly broken cooking pots, of a much later period, but as we shall see, they may be of late Neolithic date. True secondary burials of the full Bronze Age were quite clearly different in character and will now be described.

S E C O N D A R Y C 1 S T CREMATIONS Of three Bronze Age cre mations i n cists, accompanied by funerary vessels, two were found outside the kerb on the south-east and the third on the south-west (Secondaries 1-3 on plan, Fig. 4) .

17

Cist 1 (Plate V I ) was revealed, at a point 7 feet from the kerb and immediately below the humus, when the unprotected base of an inverted encrusted urn (Plate VI I ) at a depth of 9 inches from the surface, was broken by a workman's foot. The cist was a stone足 lined cavity measuring 2 ft. by 1 ft. 9 inches and 1 4 inches deep, the sides being built up of four layers of horizontal slabs on three sides and of small rounded boulders on the south. There was no cover-slab and probably there never had been, for the base of the urn projected above the average height of the side-walls. It was inverted over cremated bones on a floor-slab measuring 1 8 by 1 4 by 3 inches, and lay in loose brown soil, some of which appeared to have infiltrated. On the south side of the urn were the crushed remains of a smaller vessel (Fig. 18, 89) . I n the filling also were several Neolithic sherds and flint flakes. The floor-slab had been set deep in the grey floor of the cairn within two inches of the rock, and the section (Fig. 5, D) showed a cone of soft brown earth and small stones where an extensive area of the cairn, 6 feet across, had been removed in order to insert the cist. The vessels will be described later. On the bones Professor Walmsley reports : " Well-burnt (open incineration) fragments with a very small amount of charcoal and earth : the single burial of the incinerated remains of an adult male. I was able to recognize (a) 20 teeth ; there were no duplicates ; all seemed to belong to the same set, (b) 14 phalanges : there were no duplicates, (c) several fragments of skull bones, all of which seemed to belong to the same skull : the lambdoidal suture is open ; the mastoid process has male characters, (d) two petrous temporal bones, (e) parts of the supra-orbital region, which has male characters." The cremated material was 7 lbs. in weight.

Cist 2 (Fig. 4 ; Fig. 5, Sec. D. ; see also PI. V 2). This lay at a higher level im足 mediately outside the kerb in the same area, the flooring-slab (2 ft. by 1 ft. 4 ins.) oc足 curring halfway down in the Section (Fig. 5, section D) and 1 ft. 6 ins. below the surface.

A crushed food vessel, in loose brown earth accompanied by pieces of charcoal, bones and bone dust, lav in the centre of the flooring slab ullderneath the eastern angle of a small rectangular cist measuring 1 3 by 9 1 inches. I was puzzled by the position of the cist above and to one side of the burial i t should have contained, but after examining the completed section it was clear that the floor-slab had slipped owing to the disturbance caused by the intrusion of Cist 1 .

The side-walls o f the cist, averaging 1 3 ins. by 41, were some 41 inches high, and they were separated from the floor-slab bv 6 inches of soil and small stones. Their tops were within 9 inches of the surface. Nothing was found amon!( the earth and small stones within the four walls of the cist. There was no cover-stone. The report on the bones reads, " The single burial of the incinerated remains of an adult of small size, probably female.

The total skeleton is not present, and there had probably been washing of the burial by water and possibly other disturbance. There was a good deal of accompanying charcoal (hazel) . The bones are extremely fragmentary and mostly dust : they are fully calcined.

I recognized (a) parts of the humerus, (b) five teeth, (c) one petrolls temporal bone, (d) seven phalanges, (e) several skull fragments, including a part of one supra-orbital margin and (f) part of a talus." Total weight, 8 lbs. The food-vessel (Fig. If!, 88) is discussed later.

Cist 3 . Towards the south-western edge of the cairn a crushed food-vessel (restored in PI. VI 2), accompanied by a heap of cremated bones, was found on the rock surface at a depth of 3 feet, among brown earth in a shallow excavation lined at the sides with small stones. The black and grey floors had been dug away over an area measuring 4 feet by 3, and an oval cavity (3 ft. 6 ins. by 1 ft. 6 ins.) did duty as a cist. The stone lining, in two or three rough layers, rose only 9 ins. or so above the floor. The earth and stones above-there was no cover-stone-had crushed the vessel, which had been inverted alongside the bones at the east cnd. (S3 on plan, Fig. 4) .

18

-

" The bones are the fullv calcined fragments of an adult human skeleton : the in颅 dications are that it is a male of about 40 years of age. The burning is of the kind that r associate wi th cist burials of the mid-late Bronze Age." The cremated material weighed 3 lbs. (PI. V3 ) 路 THE CACHE In describing the grey and black layers beneath the boulder-core we have assumed that all the objects in them must be contemporary with, if not older than, the construction of the cairn. It was conceivable that later objects might have slipped or been carried through the interstices and have found a resting place beneath the boulders, but in fact not a single sherd of coarse paste or Bronze Age character-of which there were many above the boulders路-was discovered among the thousands of Neolithic sherds in the basal layers, and we felt confident in our assumption that the boulder-core constituted a perfect sealing layer.

Our confidence was severely shaken by the discovery, at a point 4! feet north of the central cist, of a small group of personal ornaments of a much later date, consisting of an amber bead (Fig. 24, 77), a ring of lignite (Fig. 25, 82) and a blue glass bead with two-colour inlay (Fig. 2.1, 76). They were found within a few inches of each other, in the same horizontal plane, in the grey floor under the boulder-platform at a depth of 20 inches below the surface and only two inches above the undisturbed subsoil. There was no trace of a container : they were presumably once tied together with a string of some perishable material. We were, fortunately, able to confirm the very natural suspicion that the deposit was intrusive, but we might have been tempted, had the time-interval between the two periods not been so great, to date the construction of the cairn by the age of this latest deposit in the sealed floor.

Close examination showed that the boulders were not continuous at this point : there was a gap 9 inches across from which a stone had doubtless been removed when the cache was made (Fig. 5, Sec. F . ) . This gap was filled with fine soil containing a few small stones. The thin, black layer, moreover, was missing in this area, although present under the adjoining boulders, and we may assume that it had been scraped away at the time the cache was made. Mr. Blake Whelan, who happened to be presen t, saw the glass bead being uncovered by one of the workmen, and I personally excavated the other two ornaments, which were found a. few minutes later.

Apart from the interest of the objects themselves, which will be discussed later, the location of the cache shows that the cairn was of much the same height a thousand or so years ago, when the deposit was made, as it is to-day. Even if the objects were placed here from some religious motive, and not merely pushed into a safe hiding hole, it is inconceivable that a high cairn would have been removed in order to excavate a hole down to within a few inches of the rock. The probability is that the cairn was never raised much above its present height.

I t may have been reduced in height before the deposit was made, in the Dark Ages, but this is unlikely. Its sanctity certainly persisted into the age of the encrusted urns, when the last of the cist burials was inserted, and there may have been continued venera颅 tion into the Dark Ages, so that the " cache " could be interpreted as a votive offering.

Traces of industrial activity such as lignite-working on the site, however, make this interpretation unlikely.

MISCELLAN EOUS Miscellaneous finds include an assortment of stone objects ranging from two mesolithic beach-flints to a hone and bits of lignite, most of which turned up in the surface layers on the south.

19

The stone hone (Fig. 25, 83) came from near the south-eastern margin of the cairn at a depth of 2 1 inches. It was found by a workman during my temporary absence and I was unable to check whether it lay in the basal layer or just above it. While it may be an Iron Age hone which had worked its way down I am inclined to regard it as an original relic. It is described later, along with other miscellaneous finds THE

ENCLOSURE

THE EARTHWORK

Seven sections were taken along trenches cut through the earthwork : three of these are drawn in Fig. 6, and they are all described below.

Section C2 (Figs. I and 6). The south-eastern sector is one of the hest preserved portions of the bank, which here rises smoothly to a height of nearly 3 feet above the surrounding ground. In this area the bank does not follow the edge of the escarpment, which begins just beyond the stone wall marking the boundary of the wood, some 20 yards away from the earthwork. The section shows a uniform peaty humus layer about a foot thick, giving way to red-brown loamy earth varying in thickness from 6 to I S inches. Near its margins were boulders forming what appeared to b e lines of revetment some 20 feet apart. A few biggish stones also occurred near the top of the outer slope of the bank, but no post-holes were observed : this experimental trench, however, was very narrow. The core of the bank consisted of soft red earth containing a few lenses of red-brown earth. It yielded several flint flakes and small pieces of charcoal identified as hazel and oak. In the red also, under the highest Fart of the bank and extending towards the outer revetment, were many boulders, the largest nearly two feet in diameter.

The deepest of them were set in light brown subsoil immediately above the rock. Plain Neolithic sherds of normal Lyles Hill type were found both in the red core and at the base of the humus near the inner revetment (Fig. 26, 1 9, 20) .

The section shows that the subsoil had been scraped away on both sides of the bank to contribute to its construction, but the red core-material is not likely to have been avail足 able in sufficient quantities on the hill-top. I think it must have been carried up from the deeply weathered interbasaltic horizon below the escarpment. There are small pockets of lithomarge on the hill, but only in one place within the earthwork did we encounter, in many samples taken, a similar soft red earth. This was in the rabbit-warren by an outcrop of the basalt (Fig. I, D4) where it may be due to the weathering of one of the thin red bands such as occur between lava flows. The boulders in the bank were presumably derived from the boulder-clay which surrounds the hill at lower altitudes.

Section Cs (north-western side) . This section was very similar to C2, the same sequence of layers occurring below the peaty humus, which averaged 1 0 inches in thick足 ness. Charcoal from the red layer was identified as oak. The subsoil had been scraped away on both sides. Three lines of boulders were present, the revetment stones being about 24 feet apart, and the boulders of the central line being well preserved. Among them two postholes appeared at the highest part of the bank. The larger, 7 inches in diameter, penetrated to a depth of 2 feet 6 inches from the surface. Its filling of soft brown earth contained willow Jpoplar charcoal and some flint flakes. The other hole was a foot away-measuring from centre to centre-to the south. It was four inches in diameter and penetrated to a depth of I ft. 9 inches (Fig. 6, CS) . We opened a trench at right angles along the spine of the bank and at a distance of 6 feet came on another pair of holes, one foot apart, penetrating respectively six and three inches below the humus and measuring four inches in diameter. The spinal boulders were noticeably larger at the points where the two pairs of post-holes occurred. In general they formed an irregular row, two stones wide and two deep, individual stones varying in size from a few inches to 1 8 inches in diameter.

20

'm� j I)''t " ' 0 ' l lf

L Y L ES HILL

1'

rIf''U,.

V ' 'Y' ..ill " ' " ... , Vi ' lItW .,/'I

R A MPART S E C TI O N S 111111 mm

BROWN TILL [PRE'BANK HUMUS) SOfT BROWN LOAM

:::::::: SOFT RED EARTH - CHARCOAL HUMUS

S-E

N-W

E N TRAN(:E SECTION

"

\ ,

N,W

C l

"

SOUTHERN SECTION

. . " . '1.'.1'

S-E

[....... .. ... .

C 2

N

S

NORTH ERN S ECTION SCALE

c s

FEET 1

1

I

E A S T FACE CINTU

WEST FACE

,

"

0

L

......

Fig. 6.

w••

0

For positions of cuttings see Fig. I.

21

'

'C <, ,

I

1

I ,

11

I,

,

,

,

During the first season, when these trenches were opened, our resources were in足 adequate to pursue the investigations, and during the second season we were very fully occupied with the cairn-excavation. Accordingly the earthwork claimed our attention first when we returned to the hill in 1 947.

Section C3 (Figs. 1 and 6 ) . A 6-foot trench was cut through the bank on the north side at a point 1 1 0 feet west of the wall-crossing. The hill-top begins to fall away sharply underneath the earthwork, so that although some three feet of built-up material survives the top of the bank is in fact almost horizontal. At the south end of the cutting, before the bank was reached, a layer of small stones appeared at the base of the humus, extending the whole width of the trench. Among the stones was much dirty earth with charcoal and one biggish lump of iron slag. The pavement lay directly on a couple of inches of subsoil and in places on rotten rock at a depth from the surface of little more than a foot.

The rest of the subsoil had presumably been stripped during the construction of the bank.

Apart from a few lumpish flakes, badly struck, some with slight traces of use, no other finds were made in this area, which appears to be a squatting place of some period of the Iron Age or the early Middle Ages. The flints are markedly different from those of the Neolithic period, comparing with those from excavated raths in the Belfast area, for example, Lissue and Ballyaghagan.

The core of the bank, beginning some four feet from the edge of the later pavement, again consisted of soft, warm-red earth thinning out on both sides from a maximum thickness of 1 8 inches. I t contained charcoal specks and a few basalt pebbles and it incorporated an occasional lense of brown loam containing charcoal, probably repre足 senting casual loads of surface soil or layers of sods used in the building up process.

Brown earth, mottled red in places, overlay the red, which rested on dark brown soil with charcoal specks (old humus) a few inches above the rock. The three rough lines of boulders were again in evidence, onc near the eentre and onc at each side of the bank.

The boulders of the outer line, on steeply-sloping ground, were sunk well into the old turf and were built up in two layers. The inner and centre rows were bedded in the red and were as a rule only one stone deep.

This trench yielded several worked flints and a flint core but was exceptional in giving no sherds. It did, however, provide further evidence of a timber superstructure. On the east face of the cutting a large pocket of small stones appeared in the thickest part of the red core, thinning out to north and south over a distance of four feet and extending for three feet from east to west along the line of the bank. A squarish hole of dark soil, 2 { inches across, could be traced intermittently among the stones to a depth of 2 feet 3 inches. V,'e were not convinced that this was a posthole, for so small a stake would hardly have been driven to this depth, a depth of several feet if allowance is made for the degradation of the bank. Four feet to the west, however, a larger oval post-hole measuring 1 0 inches by 7 could be clearly traced to a depth of two feet.

In the hope of detecting further post-hole evidence we opened a longitudinal trench along the top of the bank nearby in a well-preserved portion near the crossing of the wall (C4)' I t revealed an almost continuous line of boulders, two wide and two deep, under the top of the bank, the lower rows being set in the brown sub-soil and the upper in the red core. Between the red and the humus was a layer of brown loam with small sharp stones. Near the top of the red, at depths of 1 5-2 I inches, were several sherds, of Neolithic character, but some of them differing somewhat from the normal Lylcs Hill ware (Fig. 18, 2 I -24) . A heavy corded rim (No. 23) lay near the bottom of a some足 what unconvincing post-hole consisting of a pocket of dark earth and small stones a foot across, penetrating into the red layer to a depth of 2 feet from the surface. Ko other " post-holes " were found in this cutting, but there were two thin patches of dark soil 22

' e

Co

and charcoal at a depth of 2 feet. The interval between them was was 3 feet away from the " post-hole."

7

feet, and the first

The angular stones in the brown loam covering the red were found to have a curious disposition. They tended to lie in strips 1 -2 feet wide running at right angles to the line of the bank, and most of the sherds occurred under these strips on or just below the top of the red. I t would seem that loads of small stones, containing scraps of habitation refuse, had been dumped at intervals along the spine of the bank and had tumbled down on either side. The brown layer contained scraps of charcoal and a mottling of red but no sherds. Humus to a depth of 1 foot completed the section.

Section C6. A cutting was made to the north-east of the entrance by Mr. Proudfoot in 1 95 1 . No post-holes were found, nor were the stone revetment lines very clearly defined, but the core of the bank consisted mainly of large boulders.

Section C l (Fig. 6) . This was taken along the south-western edge of the excavations in the entrance area and is described as follows by Mr. Proudfoot :

" The humus layer passes almost imperceptibly into the material which makes up the rampart, consisting of bright reddish earth with a tendency towards a clay texture.

Mixed with this is darker mottled material which probably represents old turf incorpor足 ated in the rampart with the. red earth, which is similar to interbasaltic subsoil such as occurs at a lower level on Lyles Hill. Numerous boulders in the rampart appear to form three lines of revetment, two being near the crest and the third at the base on the exterior. The innermost line of revetting is best preserved, consisting of two and often three rough courses of stones as shown i n the section and in the plan (Fig. 8) . Parallel to it and sunk more deeply is a second revetment on the line of which was a post-hole cut into the bank material and lilled with material scarcely distinguishable fro m the modern humus. It had a maximum depth of 1 2 inches below the surface of the rampart material and was six inches in diameter. Lying above and to the south-east was a scatter of stones some of which had probably fallen from the inner revetment, though there may have been originally another line of revetting near the crest of the bank.

The outermost revetment was less well marked and was accompanied by a probable post-hole, cut partly in the rampart material and partly in the underlying soft basalt.

The pre-bank turf-line ended at this line of revetting, so that it may have marked the original limit of the bank, but no difference could be detected between the rampart material on either side, although that outside was presumably washed down from the rampart."

Section C7. The cutting through the rampart on the other side of the entrance (C 7 ) revealed no post-holes, nor were the lines of revetting as clear as in the section described above.

Six typical Neolithic sherds were found i n the rampart in the entrance area, occurring in the rampart material (2) in the pre-rampart turf ( 1 ) and at the base of the modern turf (3) . In addition several flint flakes, some showing slight signs of working, were found in the modern turf and in the rampart material. Charcoal from t!le rampart was identified as alder and probably birch.

Summary

The bank, originally perhaps 5 feet high, had been piled up between two parallel lines of revelting some 20 feet apart. A row of posts, double in places, had been erected along the crest in the northern sector on both sides of the entl ance : its presence on the 23

south side is not proved but the probability is that a palisade ran the whole way round, for the central revetting which held the posts in place was everywhere present. Nothing which could be dated later than the Neolithic period was found in the rampart, and although this does not place its Neolithic age beyond all doubt, I feel satisfied that it is contemporary with the hill-settlement. The presence of a wooden palisade shows further that its purpose was defensive. The contour alignment of the bank in itself leads to this conclusion, though it is difficult to explain why it was not taken along the edge of the scarp on the south side. The most strongly defended section was on the north. It may be suggested that the ridge extending south-eastwards was cleared of forest and occupied, so that the danger of sudden attack by enemies or marauding animals was less on this side than on the north and north-west where the hill overlooks the heavy boulder clays stretching towards Lough Neagh. Yet the entrance, as we shall see, was apparently undefended.

L Y L E S H IL L

C O NTOUR PLAN OF N O RTHERN ENTRANCE

,

-

. ...

--

-,

-------- - - - - - - - -

,

, ,

L •_ _

�---

- -- - ,

"

R E F E R E NCE bl�

-

Conloun every III He,qh'l .f>ftttobovt

SCALE

""l>e l 00

FecI

,� ,� � � o � � __ � � �� o

Fig. 7.

Plan of entrance showing numbered sq uares of excavated area.

24

THE

E N T R A N CE , D I

(Fig. [ ; Fig. 7 ; Fig. 8 and Plates VII, VI I I ) .

The following account is based on yIr. Proud foot's report of his excavations, which occupied the first fortnight of October, 1 95 1 .

A dearly defined hollow trackway, [-2 feet deep, leads obliquely up the scarp to the entrance. I t is now interrupted by war-time mining activities after a course of about 50 yards, but it could be traced, in 1 937, for some distance further. The track was still used at that date by animals turned on to the hill for occasional summer grazing, and it was part of our purpose to determine whether the break in the rampart through which it led was a primary or a secondary feature. We also hoped to find further evidence as to the date of the earthwork.

Prior to excavation a plan of the entrance area was prepared (Fig. 7) contoured at 6 inch intervals. (There is a discrepancy of some 5 feet between our levels and those of the Ordnance Survey shown on Fig. J). As illustrated i n the plan, 1 2 ten-feet squares

L Y L ES H I L L

PLAN OF N ORTHERN ENTRANCE

s'

tC>� 0°0 0 .0 00 Cl

00 0

NOT

c:::P 0

EXCAVATED

o o

o

R E F E RENCE ..

�10tI'

ItT

Ot\ 'O ;> ,•..", l rwf

.. Ou�,nq \lO�"

on

'omO<l"

SCALE

- l",,,ro/ deq.Qded pre-bonI. turf _ L.... ,lof redd'lh INIltrool

,

,

0

o

l'\e1(U o

Fig. 8.

Plan of entrance after excavation.

25

m

n -<

;

1

I

were cut, separated by balks 3 feet wide, portions of which were later removed to provide complete cross-sections.

Over the central part of the cntrance area a shallow humus layer, seldom more than I D inches thick, directly overlay the rubbly top of the basalt. On either side, near the ends of the rampart, they were separated by traces of reddish material, obviously part of the original bank or material washed from it. The observed limits of this reddish material are marked on Fig. 8.

The ends of the rampart at the entrance taper uniformly as shown on the contour plan and there is nothing to suggest that they have been interfered with. On the north足 east the pre-rampart turf-line continued as far as the edge of a trench or gully dug partly across the entrance, which will be described later. Embedded in the old turf was a group of stones which looked like a revetment for the end of the bank : if they had been part of a sod and stone revetment it would be reasonable to expect the stones alone to remain (Plan, Fig. 8) .

On the south-western side of the entrance a line of sod revetting could be traced in a section cut along the line of the bank at its termination. I t had been reinforced by two lines of small stones, one of which is shown in Plate V I I I I .

THE GULLY The most striking feature revealed by excavation was a large gully, to all appearances artificial, cut into the solid basalt at the entrance, along a line continuing the north足 eastern end of the rampart. Its maximum dimensions were 22 by I I feet. I t was deepest near the northern corner of square 4-where its floor was two feet below the rock surface -and was narrower and shallower in square 7 . The gully was filled with large stones and with reddish earth similar to that forming the bank.

The upper levels of the filling were no more than a collection of boulders with no indications that they had been carefully placed : they may represent the collapse of a once more regularly built structure. The lower gully-filling, below a depth of some two feet from the original ground level, was more orderly. Two and sometimes three courses of stones had been deliberately laid down, along the outer edge of the gully, continuing northwards to join the bank : they are marked Foundation Stones on the plan (Fig. 8) , since they appeared to be the foundation stones of a wall the upper courses of which had collapsed. Such a wall would have narrowed the entrance to about 20 feet.

It has been said that traces of red earth were found in the gully filling. If this is down足 wash from the end of the bank then the gully must be contemporary with or older than the bank. The northward continuation of the gully-wall looks like a revetment for the bank, so that the probability is that bank and gully are contemporary. This is supported by the absence of red material under the foundation stones.

From the filling in the eastern part of the gully came a fragment (2.3 by 1 . 9 by I inch) of riebeckite microgranite which when sectioned proved to have its closest parallels in the rocks of Mynydd Mawr in Snowdonia. It would appear that riebeckite microgranite has not been recorded as a material for axe manufacture. One side of the Lyles Hill fragment, however, bears signs of conchoidal chipping, and the possibility that it is an import from North Wales is strengthened by the discovery of a fragment of a Graig Lwyd axe in the cairn. I t certainly cannot be described as an axe : one suggestion is that it may be a kind of traveller's sample.

A group of five pebbles was found between the second and third course stones in the gully. These pebbles are all distinctive in appearance and seem to have been deliberately collected, perhaps from some nearby stream, and inserted between these two courses of 26

stone. Four of them are rounded, with an average diameter of just less than onc inch.

The fifth is a fragment ofa rounded white quartz pebble of similar size. Two of the others are Ailsa Craig microgranite with distinctive blue speckling in a yellowish ground mass.

The remaining two pebbles are yellow in appearance, one being quartzite, the other flint. Similar pebbles were found in considerable numbers in the cairn, and their oc­ currence in the gully-filling seems to point to a ritual deposition. The possibility that the gully was the beginning of a spoil-ditch which was deliberately filled in on proving impracticable in the hard, unweathered basalt is unlikel\' in view of its po,ition in the entrance.

S J T E , D3 (Figs. [ and 9) .

On many visits to Lyles Hill I had picked up sherds and worked flints in rabbit­ scrapes occupying a small area on the western side of the hill. Here in [ 94i wc cleared a rectangular area and extended trenches where necessary to obtain cross-sections. \�c soon uncovered a hearth measuring about 4 feet in diameter. It had been built under a slight break of slope probably occasioned by the edge of a minor lava-flow. Dark soil containing specks of charcoal, sherds and flints, most of them burnt, began to appear immediately below the humus at a depth of t o inches, and reached a maximum thickness of .'i inches in the centre of the hearth. This was lined with rounded stones averaging 4inches in diameter, and its saucer-shaped cavity was sunk into light brown subsoil resting on rotten basalt. I ts southern side had been destroyed by burrowing rabbits (Fig. 9) .

Flints and sherds were very numerous both inside the hearth and in dark habitation earth on all sides. They became infrequent at distances of 2-3 feet from the edge of the hearth, but dark brown earth with a sprinkling of charcoal continued over an area measuring some [ 5 feet from north to south and about 8 feet from east to west. Wc ex­ amined the edges of the charcoal spread in the hope of finding post-holes or other evidence of wall-supports, such as stone-settings, but without results. The amount of pottery re­ covered from this single hearth-site (some 600 sherds) argues for more than temporary occupation and there remains the possibility that a sod hut, roofed with sod-covered branches resting on the wall-tops, would have left no traceable remains other than the thickened surface deposits in which the rabbits had made their burrows. In the absence of clear surface indications the excavation of extensive areas of the hill-top would be required to discover further areas of habitation. Such a programme would have held up still further the appearance of this report and might well have heen very costly.

H E A RT H

r

-

(Site D2, Fig. I).

A slightly raised mound just inside and to the south of the entrance drew our attention in [ 938 when looking for likely sites to explore. I t measured some [ 5 feet hy t o, with the long axis running parallel to the bank and I D feet away.

The height varied from 6 inches to J foot. The corners were rounded and the top was slightly dished, so that it had every appearance of being a hut foundation. I t looked too fresh, however, to belong to the original period of occupation, and the complete absence of flints and sherds from the trench which we cut through it supports this. (The whole entrance area, indeed, proved to be disappointingly poor in finds). The section showed about a foot of humus above a foot of brown subsoil on which lay patches of red-brown soil. The floor had apparently been levelled and contained many charcoal specks. Near the centre was a thin charcoal pocket J 8 inches in diameter with a single stone alongside, both lying just below the junction of floor and humus. The charcoal was finely shredded as though brushwood had been used and no pieces large enough to be identified were recovered.

RAISED AREA AT ENTRANCE

27

x (N �

,

I

1 1 1 )1 1

�

�

..

<..

0

•

,

•

0

I

'-

....

A-

�

0

�

�

i-

I

1;:'::::);1

HU MU S

b@)t21

D A R K B R OW N EARTH H E A R T H MA T E RIAL

1111111 11 1 1 1 �

SUBSOIL BA S A L T

o

I

2

3

<4

5

b

7

a

Cl

10 HE

T

y

Fig.

9.

Plan and sections of hearth-site. D3.

28

I conclude that the mound marks the site of a temporary habitation of sods such as were erected until recent times by summer herders. It closely resembles the simplest of the booiey huts which are to be seen in many of the Irish hills and which are thought to date to periods ranging from the Dark Ages down to the 1 8th century. Comparing its preservation with that of dated examples of about A . D . 1 600 occurring above Murlough Bay, County Antrim (recently excavated by Mr. Humphrey Case) I should say that it goes back at least to the early Middle Ages.

,.

I

29

D ISCU SSION Lyles Hill, up to the present, is unique in Ireland. I t is not possible to cite a single, even approximate, parallel to it : all that can be done is to match elements in its construc­ tional, cultural and ritual features, and speculate as to how the)' came together on this Irish site.

THE BANK Tllis feature enhances the interest of the site but complicates its interpretation. Some visitors to Lylcs Hill indeed have expressed doubts as to the contemporaneity of cairn and bank, but I fecl satisfied that they are of approximately the same period : the finds­ evidence, wllile not conclusive, points overwhelmingly in this direction. A priori the rampart should be somewhat older than the cairn, and the relatively simple shapes of the shouldered ware from the earthwork-and perhaps the presence of cord-decorated sherds-seem to support this. On the other hand one nlight argue, on tht' evidence of Group IV sherds, that the rampart is somewhat later than the cairn ! The size of the enclosure, its contour alignment, the construction of the bank, its denuded condition and the absencc of a fosse, all distinguish the earthwork from those of the Dark Ages of which the earthen raths are the most familiar representatives. There are a few large enclosures elsewhere in Ireland, some of wllich have been listed by Davies and Mogey," but no close parallel to Lyles Hill appears among them. The best known examples are the circular enclosures near New Grange and Four Knocks and the spectacular Giant's Ring near Belfast, all presumably of the megalithic period and of ritual significance.

Although the association of late Keolithic burials and an enclosing bank must recall the well-known British Henge monuments, there are too many points of difference for Lyles Hill to be regarded as a sanctuary. I n the first place the earthwork diverges markedly from a circular or oval shape ; it is sited not, like so many henge monuments, on level ground ncar water but on a dry hill-top ; and it has no internal ditch. For most of its course it runs along the edge of an escarpment, and there are convincing if sporadic traces of post-holes for palisading along its crest. Moreover, there are abundant evidences of habitation within the enclosure.

The most serious objection against its protective function is the wide undefended entrance. There is the possibility that additional works were contemplated but that they were stopped by some catastrophe which overtook the hill-settlers and ,,·hich was followed by the erection of the cairn. This explanation might have been acct'ptable to an earlier generation of archaeologists but catastrophic interpretations are no longer fashionable.

The entrance defences, anyhow, guarding the approach, are unlikely to have been left till last. I conclude that i f they ever existed they were so unsubstantial as to have left no trace. One thinks of the thorn defences of some African villages.

Although air-photography has so far given no support to observations made on the ground, there is the possibility, already mentioned, that an outer earthwork lower down the scarp prQ\·ided the first line of defence. On several occasions I noticed traces of an outer bank some 50-70 yards below the hill-top rampart. Exploration in 1 937 was impeded bv demc undergrowth and traces of old mining operations, and confirmation in I �).1 7 , aftCf a period of mechanical devastation, was impossible. Even if there had been onc or more outer defences, as in the English causewaved camps, the critical point of 62

---- - .:... .----.:... . � .

) ,

--�-" , '. .

_

.

.-u"-..:........ ._ ..

defence would seem to be the inner entrance on the scarp, so that its width remains a problem. There mav after all have been some ritual element in the open entrance to the camp. It is dil1icult to see any purpose in the gully and one wonders w het h er i t " ep resents a ritual closing of the entrance.

At the Trundle, in Sussex," the main entrance to the inner enclosure of the causewayed camp was, tojudge from the plan, over 50 feet wide. It was approached obliquelv, however, by a narrowing passage between two of the ramparts and there may ha\'e been some such arrangement at Lyles Hill. The solitarv and problematical post-hole found in one of the ends of the bank at the entrance may be one ofa series covering the approach.

At first sight a comparison between Lyles Hill and the causewayed camps of South England seems out of place because the interrupted ditches which are the.i r distinguishing feature and from which their name is taken do not occur at Lyles Hill. Yet there can be no great difference in time between them, and the absence of spoil-ditches is readily under­ standable in a region of hard stone where the rampart material could not readily be quarried ill situ. The concentric rings of the causewayed camps with their interrupted ditches (for Irish readers I should write slzeuglu) enclose large area, of hill-country, amount­ ing to 23 acres in the most famous, Windmill Hill near Avebury. Although the ramparts which ran inside the ditches were very denuded and apparently had several entrance­ breaks, it is significant that at Whitehawk Camp in Sussex," Curwen found traces of a single line of post-holes for a wooden fence or breastwork, as at Lyles Hill.

The causewayed camps, however, always seem to have had several entrances and are closely linked to similar sites of the Michelsberg culture in Belgium and Germany. Nor do they conform to the contours " Further, their builders buried their dead with the minimum of ceremony, so that a close connexion with Lyles Hill cannot be sustained.

We have already noticed, however, several features which they share, and it should be added that the shouldered and carinated pottery types of Whitehawk and some of the leathery Hembury sherds with everted rims recall the Ulster-Yorkshire family of Neo­ lithic A2 ware.

For the combination of defended hill-settlements and burial monuments one turns to the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. In the neighbourhood of Carnac in Morbihan, Brittany, are many hill-camps which Le Rouzic places in the Neolithic:Bronze Age transition early in the second millennium. These were evidently habitation sites, for hut foundations are numerous. The best-known example, Le Lizo, is a contour-camp enclosing at least five burial monuments" : the bank is the collapse of a wall of loose stones contained within parallel stone facings.

From Brittany one turns naturally to Iberia, and thinks of the defended hill-settle­ ments of Los Millares in South-east Spain, trading citadels occupied by the earliest metallurgists of south-western Europe, with their accompanying cemeteries of corbellcd tombs. The combination of defended hill-settlements and burial sites, then, is well-known in Western Europe in late Neolithic and Chalcolithic times, and we may confidently look southwards along the Atlantic megalithic route for many of the culture-elements reflected in Lylcs Hill. It is idle to speculate further until other examples are brought to light nearer home. Mr. T. G. E. Powell's re·examination of the supposed defensive site at Gwaenysgor, Flintshire," is to be published shortly. He assures me that the results were negative.

Sussex Arch. Coli. LXX (1929), 32-85 j LXXII ( 1 9 3 1 ), 100-149.

E. C. Curwcn, Ant. ]oum. XIV ( 1 9 34) 99- I 3 3 .

8 2 E . C. CUIwen, The Archaeology o /Sussex 1 9 37, 78.

83 Le Rouzic, Premieres Fouillcs au Camp du Lizo, Rev. Arch., 1 9 3 3. 189-:219. Cr. Rosmeur, Finistcre (C. D. Forde, All!. Journ VII., p. 8).

84 ElIis Davies, The Prehistoric and Roman Remains of Flintshire 1949, p. 148.

80

Bl

63 .

_ ..

THE MEGALITHIC KERB

Here again we come upon constructional features for which close parallels are hard to find .. There arc elements in the cairn-structure which recall both long and round cairn tradItIons, and though superficially it is the latter which is dominant, there are puzzling features such as the siting (not precisely on the highest point of the hill ) , the low platform­ hke form of the cairn and the irregular kerb which are not in keeping with passage-grave tradition in Ireland : moreover, there is no trace of a passage in the cairn.

The shape and construction of the megalithic kerb, with its semi-circular sweep, its sill-and-jamb " entrance " and the adjacent taller orthostats, at once recall the forecourt­ fa<;ades of the Clyde-Carlingford horned cairns. I regret that a fuller investigation of the area immediately adjacent to the cairn east of the sill was not undertaken. Our ex­ ploratory trench in this area, it may be recalled, revealed the stone foundations of a wall in which the presence of bits of iron discouraged further excavation at a time when the cairn was yielding its embarrassing harvest of finds. This J took to be the site of the Templetown summer-house, though another claimant appeared during trial digging in 1 947 · At any rate it is unlikely that there was at any time a megalithic structure in this area.

A precise parallel to Hanging Thorn cairn, Ballyutoag (four miles away to the south­ east) cannot therefore be claimed for Lyles Hill : nevertheless there are points of resem­ blance. The features of Hanging Thorn cairn" may be summarized as follows : scattered megalithic blocks, presumably the remains of segmented chambers, lead up to a fa<;ade of the type known in our horned cairns, with sill-and-jamb entrance. No traces of a cairn were found except in the forecourt, which was completely filled with cairn material 22 ! ft . thick and about 1 4 ft. in diameter. I t rested on a central charcoal layer measuring 6 ft. by 3, containing potsherds. There was also a scatter of Neolithic pottery through the cairn and in the old humus underneath.

Most excavation accounts of the Ulster horned cairns have drawn attention to the presence of hearth-fires and potsherds in the forecourt, evidence of ritual performances in that area : the pottery is always in the form of broken sherds of incomplete vessels. The forecourt must have been, before the closing of the tomb, an open space in which fires were lit and offerings made. As Piggott and Pow ell have observed," the more elaborate the fa<;ade, the more in evidence are forecourt rituals, and they point out that the Danish passage-graves have also been exceptionally productive in the area j ust outside the en­ trance, up to 50,000 sherds having been recorded in some instances.

Apart from Hanging Thorn Cairn the closest parallel in Co. Antrim so far reported is at Ballymarlagh near Ballymena 87 Indeed the parallel is in some ways more convincing for Dr. Da\'ies found pockets of burnt bone in the tightly-packed sealing of the forecourt and under it a {-inch layer, which he terms the pyre, " containing a confused matter of sherds, nints and burnt bones." At Browndod, too, most of the finds were recovered from the forecourt, which was built up as a cairn 2! feet high. Similarly at Dunloy" the whole forecourt \\'as filled with cairn material containing abundant sherds.

The Lyles Hill Cairn, then, is allied to and appears to derive from the forecourt area of a horned cairn. The practice of ritual preparation by means of fires and pits, and the offering of sherds and flints, were developed on the grand scale, and cremation was carried out on the site. Moreover the cairn, like the forecourt-cairns of the gallery-graves, " 1. .1 . Hening, Proc. B.N.H.P.S. 1 936-37, 43-49.

1948-49, 103- 161, p. 131. " O. Da\'ies, V.J.A. XII ( 1 949), .6-42 . . . E. E. E\'ans, CJ.A. 1 ( 1938), 59-78. " P.S.A.S.

.

64

was not built up more than a few feet in height. But the addition of a central grave and of a decorated sill-stone in the dummy entrance recalls passage-grave traditions. The con­ tinued deposition of secondary cremations and of ritual offerings above the cairn­ boulders are also novel features for the origin of which we must look elsewhere.

It is conceivable indeed that the chronological sequence here sketched should be re­ versed and that the Ulster horned cairn series has its starting-point in the addition of segmented chambers to the false-entrance of a degenerate passage-grave ! Speculation in advance of further evidence is idle. Rather than chase morphological will-o'-the-wisps I would prefer in the present state of our ignorance to regard Lyles Hill as a local product of the mingling of diverse traditions in a region of entry where many cultures met. A parallel line of devolution from the fa�ade of the horned cairn may perhaps be seen in the stone circles" of mid-Ulster, some of which have an open portion opposite vestigial entrances and others alignments or three adjacent standing stones reminiscent of gallery and portal." In one excavated example (Clogherny Butterlope) Davies found several small pits filled with soft black material and intended, he suggests, " for libations or similar rites."91 The passage-grave element in the megalithic culture of north-east Ireland is relatively small, but apart from the Fair Head group there are indications of pen etrations both in the Carlingford Lough region (Slieve Gullion, Clermont and Slieve Donard) and in the area of Belfast Lough (Collin, Cam Grania and other sites, now destroyed, in the sands of the Six Mile Water valley) . Some of these sites have circular chambers, usually with corbelIed roofs, and so far as we know all have or had passages, but no excavation has been done save for H.C. Lawlor's limited exploration at Cam Grania, and we have no detailed informa­ tion on them. All we can say is that a passage-grave culture, of early date to judge by the cor belied cupolas of the Carling ford district, was intrusive in north-east Ireland. The circular cairn, the chamber-like cist and possibly the decorated sill-stone could be derived from this source. A destroyed " under-ground " (? cairn covered) circular chamber near the Giant's Ring, apparently without entrance passage. may be cited here." Seven feet in diameter, it was neatly paved and had a corbelled roof three feet high. It contained " urns" with cremated bones as well as unburnt skulls and animal bones.

I t would seem that the round-cairn tradition which in the end was to prevail throughout the Bronze Age, was able in some areas to absorb the long-cairn mode. Another illustration in north-east Ireland may be seen at Aghnaskeagh (cairn B) Co. Louth, a long cairn with three separate chambers " swallowed " by a round cairn."

CREMATION When we consider this important ekment in the Lyles Hill cairn complex we turn naturally to an area, Yorkshire, with which the Belfast region has had persistent cultural links into the proto-historic period and indeed later. The bulk of the Lyles Hill pottery finds its closest parallels outside Ulster in the same direction, and also in south-west Scot­ land. In so far as this betrays a movement of people we may perhaps single out the York­ shire-south Scotland link as the most important in the series, but one would like to know more about a class of low Cornish round barrows such as those near Pelynt which had been erected over funeral pyres and which contained a succession of later cremations near the centre " PYRE

) \

f 1

I

i

8 9 A cousinly relationship with the recumbent stone circles of north·east Scotland and their centra! cremations may also be suspected.

Davics, U.}.A. JJ ( 1 939), 2·14.

Davies, U.].A. II ( 1 939), 42. " U.J.A. III ( 1 8551, 358-365. " E. E. Evans, C.L.A.J. IX ( 1 937), 1 - 1 8.

1) 4 W. H. Box, 28th Report of the Ro)·ai In.stitution of Cornwall, ( 184 7),

iO

91

65

Appendix Il,

38-56.

Both Greenwell" and Mortimer" have left many accounts of barrows in East Yorkshire which were erected over a funeral pyre and which exhibited, in addition-though it is not clear from the accounts whether all these features co-existed in any one barrow-the following parallels to Lyles Hill : I . The barrows are low ( I to 4 feet in height) and round (50 to 60 feet in diameter) .

2 . The pyre extended south-east or south-south-east of the centre.

3. In addition to the main pyre, fires had frequently been lit over other parts of the area on which the barrow was erected.

4. Burnt animal bones (ox, pig and sheep or goat) frequently accompanied the cre­ mations and in some cases the animal bones, at least, were also found scattered through the material of the barrow.

5 . Flints and potsherds, often in " enormous quantities " were found throughout the barrows, but most plentifully " on the old surface line under them."

6. Holes or trenches filled with earth, stones and " unctuous matter " are frequently sunk into the ground below the barrows.

7. The barrows occasionally cover an incomplete circle of stones. In one instance, it should be added (Mortimer Barrow No. 55) " on the inside of one slab were traces of a few faintly incised lines from two to three inches in length.""

Both Greenwell and Mortimer offer the same explanation of the occurrence of flints and sherds through the body of the barrows. They are found in some instances, says Green­ well, " in such quantities as to suggest the idea that the persons who were engagec! in throwing up the barrow, scattered them, from time to time, during the process." While they may be the remains of vessels broken at the funeral feasts, he goes on, " we should then expect to find many pieces belonging to the same vessel more frequently than is the case." Similarly he dismisses the idea that they are casual scrapings from old habitation levels, utilized in the making of the barrow, because they occur in rubble cairns as well as in earthen barrows. And he reinforces this with an argument which I have used above, that " the number (of flints) in some mounds is so very large as to preclude the idea that they can ever have lain on the surface in qnan(jties so great as to account for that abun­ dance." The conclusion they reach is that the offerings " symbolised some religious idea," and Greenwell makes the reference to Hamlet which we have noticed above. He explains as accidental, however, the animal bones frequently found burnt i n cremations, though he thinks they may quite possibly " represent animals killed at the funeral and burnt with the body." Mortimer regards the broken animal bones as " the remains of feasting during the funeral obsequies and the making of the mound."

Whether the animals were sacrificed and burnt entire at Lyles Hill or whether their remains were burnt after feasting it is impossible to say. but it 'will be remembered that a deer's leg had been burnt. entire. In any case, burnt animal bones were so general in the cairn that I think their burning must be regarded as an integral p art. of t.he ritual.

When we come to consider an explanation of these mass cremations or " ritual holocausts " a wide field of speculation is opened. Current opinion looks with disfavour on catastrophic explanations-the occasion of war or the occurrence of an epidemic­ and to speak vaguely of funerary rites is to shirk the iss ue. If we are right in regarding the cremation of the youth (or maiden) in th� central cist as primary, there is every possibility \V. Grecnwcll, British Barrows J877.

96 J. R. Mortimcr, Fort), Years' Researches

i5

1/7

Op. cit., p. 1 00.

in East Yorkshire J 905.

66

..

�oC_"'�"'�'

�_oI

_ _"',,_

.. ...

�- - � .....

-

� ..

•

-.-

. - ----

•

----.--- �---�-.-.--- ---.

�

�-. '.--

that the mass cremations were slaughtered attendants. The broken pots and fractured Aints and axes might symbolise the broken lives. The primary cremated material found under the cairn comprises adult remains, but beyond Professor vVal msley's opinion that there were :\t least two skeletons, we have no evidence as to their number. Allowing for the bones scattered throughout the upper part of the cairn, it would seem that several bodies are probably represented, though some cremated material may have come from older burials.

It is important to notice that the East Yorkshire parallels are by no means so complete as the summary given above suggests. The Yorkshire barrows frequently covered a beaker inhumation, and the megalithic element, i f we exclude some conceakd stone circles, was absent. The cremation-barrow idea was here combined with beaker practices, whereas at Lyles Hill it is the megalithic cult which is in evidence, and the single fragment of beaker pottery is secondary. The adoption of cremation by the builders of megaliths which were originally designed for inhumed burials may provide the clue to many variants in Irish megalithic construction. There is for example the aberrant Doey's Cairn at Dunloy, Co. Antrim, where a stone-lined cremation flue, with three pits, took the place of the normal segmented gallery of the horned cairns.

THE PITS We need not go far afield to find abundant evidence of the ritual pIt In megalithic practice, for i t is recorded repeatedly in the Ulster horned cairns, usually in the forecourt area. The present writer first encountered it at Goward," where the central part of the forecourt had a shallow pit containing charcoal and a potsherd. At Ballyalton the fore­ court cairn rested on a pavement and contained charcoal and sherds." There were two pits, containing dark earth and sherds, i n the inner chamber of the cairn, and in both chambers a series of bone-pockets comprising slightly calcined fragments of human and animal bones. Three pits containing dark filling and potsherds were found under the forecourt-cairn at Browndod.'oo I n most examples excavated in Ulster insufficient atten­ tion was given to the forecourts, and full excavation would almost certainly reveal fresh evidence. At Ballybriest, Co. Londonderry, a black layer 10 ft. in diameter was found underlying one of the two megalithic components of a double horned cairn ( Carnanbane) .

It contained sherds, burnt flints and a trace of burnt bone and was found to dip into many hearths and pits, most of them in the forecourt area.'''

Similar pits were also found at Dun Ruadh, Co. Tyrone.''' where they were apparently regarded as habitation feaLUres, associated, however, with an enclosing bank and ditch of ring-barrow affinities. At the Druid Stone, Ballintoy, Dr Mogey found a polygonal chamber set in a round cairn which overlay a black layer, including Aints and Neolithic A2 sherds, dipping into depressions or pits.'o, In Southern Ireland pits have been recorded from ring barrows in Limerick!o, and Cork 10 s At Moneen (Cork) there were hints of a vestigial entrance and of the ceremonial breaking of pottery in the cairn which marked the second phase on the site.

Scottish megaliths of the Clyde group, while showing many features which arc repeated in their Ulster counterparts, have not yielded evidence of pits, but a passage grave, the White Cairn, Bargrennan, was found to have one, with a cremation, near the entrance, Proc. B.N.H.P.S. 1 93 2-33, gO-1 05 . " Ibid ( ' 933-34) ' 74-'0.[.

1 0 0 Ibid ( ' 9 34-35), 7°-87.

1 0 1 Evaru, P.R.I. A . XL V ( 1 939), 1 - 1 2 .

1 0 :!: Davies, Proc. B.N.H.P.S. 1 935-36, 50- 75' 1 0 3 U.}.A. IV ( '94'), 49-56. t8

1 0( Barrows I II and IV Rathjordan, O'Riordain, ].C.H.A.S. 10S M. J. O'KcJly, P.R.I.A. '952, 1 0 1 - 1 59· 67

1947.

I

ff ;

1948, 1 9 ff.

and it is compared with the pits at BallatcarelO' i n the Isle of Man. Here Dr Bersu's dis­ coveries are important for u; in that they demonstrate the association of cremation cemeteries and ritual pits, albeit without a covering mound, with the late Neolithic Ronaldsway culture. Bersu, however, is inclined to explain his holes as ustr.'·nae, of the type known from Lausitz, having the practical purpose of collecting ashes and bones which fell from a funeral pyre and which were then recovered and placed in urns. True post-holes also occurred as well as hollows filled with light soil .

For Scotland, Childe cites several instances where the whole area under the cairn was mottled by fires presumably kindled for some ritual purpose before the erection of the mound.' 07 In England the ritual pit sunk into the old ground surface is characteristic of the Neo­ lithic long barrow, being recorded by Colt Hoare, Creenwell, Mortimer and others in Wiltshire and Yorkshire. They have sometimes been found to contain scraps of charcoal, animal bones and potsherds. As noticed above, this was frequently observed by Greenwell and Mortimer in the Wold barrows : as many as four or five were found in some instances, generally circular in shape and about 1 8 inches in diameter and depth. More recently Fox has discussed their association with secondary cremations at Simondston cairn in Glamorganshire.lO' Atkinson has noted their occurren ce in the bottom ofditches in the Dor­ chester henge-monumentslO' and Piggott has described an arc of seven larger pits, some containing cremations, from the first phase at Cairnpapple,110 " a cremation cemetery of c. 2000 B.G. " In passing, Piggott notes a parallel between the three stone-holes found at Cairnpapple (" The Cove " ) and the false-portal ofLyles Hill cairn.'ll Failing to find a utilitarian function for these pits most writers have labelled them " ritual pits," and Atkinson uses the term bOlhmi, " pits dug as a means of communication with a nether world whose domain was to be disturbed . . . . through the medium of which some propitiatory or prophylactic offering could be made." '" Their mc, whatever it may have been, was widespread in late Neolithic burial ceremonies. I t may be observed that similar though larger stone-lined pits, filled with dark earth, Neolithic A sherds and fragments of cremated bone were found in a gravel pit at Killaghy, Co. Armagh.ll 3 Crema­ tion in pits may well have been established before the coming of the megalith-builders.

SECONDARY CREMATIONS

These fall into two, perhaps three, chronological groups. The first series, which from their position immediately above the boulder-platform and from their associated pottery should be late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, extends south-south-east for a distance of 1 0 feet from the cist, partly overlying the thick black layer which marks the site of the main pyre under the boulders. The second series, which, though at a higher level and associated with very different pottery, shows similar cremation techniques and cannot be much later in date, is located outside the kerb on the north as well as on the south. The third series, the three cists of the full Bronze Age, is again confmed to the south and south-east. I t is interesting to observe that the custom of locating the cremations to the south and south­ east of the centre point, already evidenced in the position of the main pyre, was observed I 0 6 P.P.S. 1 94j, 1 6 1 ,

1 0 7 The Prehistory of Scotla;ld 1 935, p.

1 08.

1 0 8 Arch. LXXXVII, 1 - 1 2.

1 0 9 Excavations at DoreMsta, Oxon, 1 95 1 .

1 1 0 P.S.A.S. ' 9 47'48, 68" 23.

111

Ibid, p.

1 1 2 Gp.

I J 3. cit, p. 58.

1 1 3 Evans, U.J.A. III ( 1 940), 1 39. 1 4 1 .

68

'�a / .

"·"Tr"""

•

" ,

_ __ _.

""/1 .. _ "J.o;-;r- y ,";,.;,J/-J " .

--,, �4.. .. , ...... . � _: ___lo. . _ _ __

...

__

��.,�

.';....

- . ", -

. ___

�.

_,

-

.u.

'" . '. � .. .,._tOl..... ... -..,__ •

almost without exception throughout. In the Dorchester henge-molluments, similarly, and probably at Stonehenge, too, the cremation deposits were confined to the south or south-eastern half. Professor Piggott has commented on the similar concentration of secondary cremations of Middle and Late Bronze Age date in many southern English barrows. Evidently we have to deal with a persistent tradition which, at Lyles Hill, gives us a link with the Sanctuary sites and with the Yorkshire pyre-cremations.

CONCLUSION

This discussion has taken us far outside Ireland and has led us in three directions : to south Scotland, east Yorkshire and the Baltic lands ; to the Isle of Man, North Wales, Cornwall and beyond to Brittany and Iberia : and to lowland England and the Rhine­ land. The first two lines of contact are undoubtedly the most important, represented on the one hand by pottery types and cremation rituals, on the other by megalithic practice and commerce, and by the association of burial sites and defended habitations. The con­ tribution of the long-established mesolithic cultures of north-east Ireland would appear to be slight, but it may yet be shown that in Ulster as in Britain the secondary Neolithic of the period of the axe factories owed much to native tradition. We can certainly point to the hollow saws and some less distinctive flint tools, and it may be that the fine-line engraving of the portal-sill derives from mesolithic bone-work. The style of the engravings, however, is strongly reminiscent of early metal decoration, and both the engraving and the whipped­ cord pottery points to north-western Germany, a region which Irish products such as decorated axes were reaching in the Early Bronze Age and which may have been one of the sources of Irish tin. Moreover, if we are to allow ti� for our hypothetical devolution from the forecourt of a horned cairn, we cannot date the cairn, on current chronology, much before c. I 700 B . C. The Graig Lwyd axe fragment should be a century or two earlier, and we may postulate that the hill was first occupied early in the second millennium, that the rampart was probably built soon afterwards and that the cairn was erected around 1 750 B . C . , at a time when the developed Neolithic culture was passing into the age of metal. I f it were later we should surely have found food-vessel and perhaps beaker sherds beneath the cairn : with the possible exception of the food-vessel fragments from the central grave, such sherds were everywhere secondary.

The question of the age of some of the coarse pottery must remain open, but much of it is certainly late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age. It is difficult to draw firm conclusions as to the pottery-sequence from the sherds scattered through the cairn because, as we have argued. it may have been obtained from rubbish dumps covering several generations of occupation. Nevertheless the Lyles Hill pottery as a whole is a substantial addition to our rapidly growing store of Irish Neolithic wares : it reflects the far-flung contacts of a region set centrally in the seaways of Highland Britain and Atlantic Europe.

69

•

....... --==

, � .... � a'�"

......

Enclosure & Cairn

HILL

LYLES

CO Antrim

. C . #":: �� � "iI' ��."

,.'

1 RAC KWA Y .

� 'q'

'lf )2

" I

..

C

4

, /

.'

"

.

, .. . ... .

.. ,

..

D 4 ,.�...

'••

..

t·"

�.,

.t"• • -

t. .

·

t..

..

'

.

..

'• •

•

.("

·t·! . .t.. .

t...

,,"

·t.. ..

to '

to '

�1;.,\ ,,

.'

,!"

' '';'

="

�'

'\i,

't·,

.'

.<t...

.

.<t.!

. �, " :. .

.

,

" "'''''%"

" '�#&'''''' t..

.t."

�. �

......

."",.

"� �// '/J''-

,..

t..

,"

,..

i;iiiif.j7"7!,. ;,� , ,, ," 'l� ,,; -

'"

' ", ''',I I

=="';�=O:��"=====�=====""''=====�===�t., to'

,.

-b. I", ' I

't..

·t"

't·..

·t·!

.<!:..

... '.r,

-� ..

FI£.

-x=:::::::e:_

:0 '"

J

�

'" "' ,,

,

t··

'�"

·t··

,

" "1

I.

" '0

C2

IJ

•

I

•

l

�\

_ ..

·t..

"::"..;:;: - ,, .

ClIc;l\aled area�.

PL.m, sho....in£ .

� L ___ _SC

J

. '§

''J:.'. ff

·t·.. ..t.•

--y-,-..�-

, .,' � ",

·t·/

,-'<-I;'

.t..!

j' O lJ o r r y �'

�"'il_ j: ·t·:

1. .

.t:...

t··

�,

,%,

�'

-t"

',,,

t.o'

'�\-" 'r',

'�"

'�..'

f�l

"

. \,�� " , \ " '\�\\\' /'It, , Tlrn"',ij, '@ �'\\\ \�\ Il''liP'"'1 .t.. ·t" ' ,, ,

'"" ..,.�'.� •

.�...

4'

, -

If" '

-

;

.t.'!

�

' ,

" "" " "'t, _ ,'

'

':'1

. . �\

.-

'\;';/ '"

•

·t· ·

.�.,

<"

.

rt:f �;:" ' fi

' I ,.,...

't..

-t, ·

,�"

;!..

"·'"· �A ·�.. ,� . %>-. . " 05

.t:.!

'�"

.

'11\

�E

'�'!

""

.

f' ' ''''

1"�!

.t,.! .. .�

,,'! , ·t·,

\\"

,

t·· .t.,!

·t,.-

""

-

,�"

t"

.

.. . . .

·t·!

'"''

l. .

.1�:<;:.. .'�" � � �

.

\

'

·t·,

't... .'!;...

,.

t.. ·t..

to' .�..

l..

-�"

·le·,

-,-- ----::.=..:

,'

'l/:t"x:t'":5f")·\�l;#'· lit!;:},

'('1

'"['1

't·..

"'1'

'<',

'<:'!

.t;.!

·t·!

'%-;; .'

� ..

.(..

.,t..

.t....

\:�,

-t·!

("

·t· ·

" ""

,

t'

.t'. .

'�'!

····;i ' -''<'·'·'1%:%i.?&�J, ·t.. , . �.( \", � .;8. '

'

. """/c

:::: ,

.t'.•

·t·!

...,�

DI

�_

'�"

I,. %" "

3

'; Cb '##1'�/ C 7/

'1 .. ';: '4'l ..<t � '4" ' ! l'I ' : I I !l! J;fj//�I;t 'I'ilml\' I I,I.,!

'J'I'II '. . . ,."" """ II . " , .

11 ,\ \ ,W,\ . ' ,,,,,,·'" 'r. ff " ' .

1 1'1 'It, " " ..j , �..\\:.,,,'.••II � / f!; I..t... , " I{ "'�\\."

-

,�

,{,'\\'"

, , ' . , '. -�;;.t-�:·:� ·;;,:�··�- , ;

'

, � .". ..., '"

_

� �.�.- �..

--:...

_ .

.