used as a cooking hole, into which, after it had been thoroughly heated, meat was put with hot pebbles and covered over until it was sufficiently baked. One small piece of pottery, a flint knife, and two flint scrapers, are all the articles of human workmanship found in the twenty circles cleared at Grimspound.
Other collections of circles have, however, been explored in different parts of Dartmoor which, while their general characteristics were very similar, have supplied some further remains of the handiwork of their former occupants. Several flint knives, scrapers and flakes, hones, rubbers, and mullers, one stone with a hole bored nearly through it, a spindle whorl of baked clay (a most important indication of the comparative civilization of the inhabitants), and some very rude pottery, are the produce of later excavations.
At Legis Tor, where a very interesting collection of eleven huts was thoroughly excavated only last year, an urn, ten inches in diameter and twelve deep, was found set in the ground in place of a cooking hole; its bottom had been broken by use, and mended anciently with a lump of china clay, without its being removed; two cooking stones and some earth and ashes were found in it, but there were no ashes round the outside; fragments of urns were also found in the cooking holes of the other huts at this place, several of which were rudely ornamented, but all were of very poor construction.
Up to the end of last season seventy-nine huts which showed signs of human occupancy had been explored in various parts of Dartmoor, of which thirty-seven have yielded tools, flakes, and cores of flint; twenty-six have shown remains of pottery; thirty had cooking holes, some of which contained round-bottomed vessels of coarse pottery, red outside and black within; twelve have produced rubbing stones, and nearly all have contained cooking stones.
The long steep hill of Carnbrê, near Redruth, with its mediæval tower at one end, and the Dunstanville monument at the other end, is well known to all visitors to western Cornwall. Here Dr. Borlase wandered and found various Druidic remains which I entirely failed to identify when I visited the spot in 1869, but both he and I were ignorant of what was really there beneath our feet. It had long been known that there were a few
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