The friends were walking by the estuary and the tide was in. "He has got into a queer sort of basket boat covered with hides and is paddling about among a lot of other little brown people in similar boats. Ah, there is a forest over there." The antiquarian looked across the discoloured line of the Doom Bar to the sandhills opposite, but not a tree was to be seen. He remembered afterwards, however, that many centuries ago a forest, now submerged, had occupied the eastern side of the Camel estuary.
So sparsely inhabited is this coast that the worked flints and arrow-heads of that bygone people still lie on the undisturbed surface of the rocky land. The flints are so sharp, so clean, that it seems their owners can have only just laid them down. And we must remember that this is not a flint country. Every sharp atom was brought from far away in the days when the rivers had to be forded and there were only paths over the waste. Yet, onward from Tregudda Gorge, there are any number to be found. Moreover after Trevone--an uninteresting place where some bathing fatalities have occurred--we come, in broad and beautiful Harlyn Bay, to the necropolis of this vanished race.
In 1900, when digging for the foundations of a house, an oblong slate kist, lying north and south, and containing a "crouched" burial, was found. The drift sand lay some 8 to 10 ft. above the grave, within which the skeleton lay on his side, his hands over his eyes, his knees bent under him in what seems to us an attitude of devotion; as he lay the first ray of the rising sun would strike athwart his face. Further investigation showed that the discovered kist was only one of a group of interments, and that the graves covered some 90 ft., giving signs of a long continued series of burials, rather than of a great number within a short period. The date of interment is considered to be that of the later iron age, no great antiquity it is true, but some few thousand years ago. The kind and courteous owner, Colonel Bellers, allows access to this prehistoric graveyard--locally known as the Boneries--and near by is a small museum for the preservation of interesting finds. Some of the kists have been left _in situ_ and, to preserve them from wind and weather, have been covered with a sort of cucumber frame, and the stranger looks down through the glass on to the brown bones in their enduring coffins of slate. Here lies a chieftain, for over his kist were heaped rough lumps of quartz crystal; here a mother and child, little bones and bigger; and here, in a heterogeneous mixture of all sorts and sizes, is a hint of tragedy. Were they the result of a battle--of a cannibal feast--or of justice done!