‘And but the great command o’ersways our order, She should in ground unsanctified have lodged To the last trumpet: for charitable prayers, Shards, flints and pebbles, should be thrown on her.’
The body of him for whom the mound was built was not buried in the centre, but at one end, and that commonly the east, for in most cases the barrows lie east and west. It is never stretched out flat, but lies or sits in a crouched attitude, the head brought down upon the breast, and the knees raised up to meet the chin. So that the dead man was generally left facing toward the west--the going down of the sun. There cannot but be some significance in this. The daily death of the sun has, in all ages and to all people, spoken of man’s own death, his western course has seemed to tell of that last journey upon which all are bent. So that the resting-place of the soul is nearly always imagined to lie westward in the home of the setting sun. For the rest, there seems little doubt that the barrows represent nothing else--though upon a large scale--than the dwelling-home of the time, and we may believe that the greater part of the funeral rights connected with the mounds were very literal and unsymbolical.[13] The Eskimo and Lapps of our day dwell in huts no more commodious than the small chambers of the barrows, and exceedingly like them in shape; only they keep them warm by heaping up over them not earth but snow. In these hovels they sit squatting, in an attitude not unlike that of the skeleton of the tumuli. Of the human remains the skulls are small and round, and have a prominent ridge over the sockets of the eyes, showing that the ancient race was of small stature with round heads--what is called _brachycephalus_, or short-headed, and had over-hanging eyebrows; in short, their skeletons bare a considerable resemblance to those of the modern Laplanders.
We are still, however, left in darkness about that part of the stone-age thought which has left the grandest traces, and of which we should so much have wished to be informed; I mean the religion. Besides the tumuli we have those enormous piles of stone called cromlechs, or dolmens, and sometimes _miscalled_ Druid circles--such as the well-known Stonehenge; these cromlechs were, we may believe, temples or sacred places. Each arrangement of the stones is generally like a simple portico, made by placing one enormous block upon two others; and these porticoes are sometimes arranged in circles, as at Stonehenge, sometimes in long colonnades, as at Carnac in Brittany. Lesser dolmens have been found in most European countries. There can be little doubt that these huge monuments possessed a religious character. And here is one proof of the fact. As a rule, the grave-mounds--the tumuli--are built upon elevations commanding a considerable prospect, and it is rare to find two within sight. Yet over Salisbury Plain, and the part about Stonehenge, they are much more numerous, as many as a hundred and fifty having been discovered in this neighbourhood, as though all the ground about this great cromlech were a hallowed region, and it were a desired privilege to be buried within such sacred precincts. Of the worship which these stone altars commemorate we know absolutely nothing. There seems to be no reasonable doubt that they belong to the period we are describing. The name Druid Circles, which has been sometimes given them, is an absurd anachronism, for, as we shall have occasion to see later on, the ancestors of the Kelts (or Celts), to whom the Druidical religion belonged, were probably at this time still living on the banks of the Oxus in Central Asia; at any rate they had not yet migrated to Brittany or to Great Britain. Thus, though we must continue to wonder how these people could ever have raised such enormous stones as altars of their religion, the nature of that religion itself is hidden from us.