of the great king there buried in the centre, very little below the surface; the bones were extremely rotten, so that they crumbled them in pieces with their fingers. The soil was altogether chalk, dug from the side of the hill below, of which the whole barrow is made. Six weeks after, I came to rescue a curiosity which they took up there, an iron chain, as they called it, which I bought of John Fowler, one of the workmen: it was the bridle buried with the monarch, being only a solid body of rust. I immersed it in a limner's drying cloth, and dried it carefully, keeping it ever since very dry. It is now as fair and entire as when the workmen took it up. There were deer's horns, an iron knife with a bone handle, too, all excessively rotten, taken up along with it.'[1] Bracy Clark described the bit in his 'Treatise on Bits.'
Hoare asserts that the majority of the Wiltshire barrows, of which this Silbury Hill was undoubtedly one, were the sepulchral memorials of the Celtic and first colonists of Britain; and some may be ascribed to the subsequent colony of Belgæ who invaded the island. Roberts[2] plainly indicates that this immense cairn must have been erected before the arrival of the Romans; for the Roman road which traverses this county, and which passes in a tolerably direct line, when it reaches the mound turns out of its course to avoid it, and in doing so cuts through a large barrow in its vicinity, part of which is yet standing between the avenue and the hill. It was in the vicinity of this mound that these shoes were met with.
