What would first impress an ordinary wayfarer is the vast number of the round barrows compared with the rarity of those of the older form. The mounds clustered in the immediate neighbourhood of Stonehenge many times outnumber all the long barrows in Britain. Three hundred still exist in an area of twelve square miles; and from one spot hard by the great stones Stukeley counted a hundred and twenty-eight.[712] Again, while the long barrows almost always stand on conspicuous hills, round barrows are sometimes placed on low ground.[713] In certain maritime districts, for instance Cornwall and Brittany, it has been noticed that the monuments of the dead are most thickly strewn in the extreme west, as if the builders had desired that the spirits of those who had gone before them might look upon the setting sun.[714]
The material, it need hardly be said, varied according to the resources of the district. In Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall cairns are almost universal, some being of gigantic size. In 1876 a cairn in Fifeshire was opened; and after more than a thousand cartloads of stones had been removed, a solitary cist appeared, containing one interment.[715] Sometimes, however, mounds of various kinds coexist in the same region: thus in Devonshire we find round barrows, cairns, and small central cairns covered by round barrows.[716] In other counties again barrows made of earth, of chalk, and of earth and chalk mixed may be seen close together.[717] Curiously enough many barrows on the Yorkshire Wolds were constructed of clay which had been fetched from distant places.[718]
Round barrows range in diameter from twenty to one hundred and fifty feet; and while some are even now twenty-four feet high, others barely rise above the level of the surrounding ground.[719] Those of the oldest form, which, however, continued to be erected contemporaneously with others of later types, have some resemblance to a shallow inverted bowl. More than three-fourths of the Wiltshire barrows belong to this variety, which is also prevalent in Yorkshire and almost invariable in Derbyshire, Dorsetshire, Somersetshire and the Orkney Islands.[720] These mounds are occasionally surrounded by shallow ditches, in which cases they represent a transition to the form which is called bell-shaped.[721] Barrows of the latter kind, which stand on a flat area surrounded by a ditch, but not by a bank, and are larger, steeper, and more conical than those of the primitive form, are far more numerous in Wiltshire, and especially round Stonehenge, than elsewhere; although a few exist in other parts of Southern England, and some of the so-called bowl barrows in the East Riding can hardly be distinguished from them.[722] Latest of all were the disk-shaped barrows,--small mounds standing alone, in pairs, or in groups of three, within a circle defined by a ditch, which is fenced on its outer side by a bank. Occasionally the enclosure contains no mound at all, but only a grave dug out of the chalk; on the other hand, in one instance the whole area within the ditch is covered by a low mound. Disk barrows are commonest near Stonehenge, and outside Wiltshire they are hardly to be found except in the adjoining corner of Dorsetshire, on the Cotswold Hills, in Sussex, and, though rarely, in Derbyshire. As they contained ornaments more frequently than the other kinds, it has been supposed that they were specially devoted to the interment of women;[723] but we may accept the explanation that, like the barrows, the ornaments for the most part were comparatively late.