The Spade as a Recorder of the Past.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 11635, 16 March 1901, Page 6 (Supplement)

The Spade as a Recorder of the Past.

One of the least recognised advances of our century is the extension of the past of which we have visible monument. We often speak as though the men of the i eighteenth century were more fortunate I than we are in this respect after 150 j years of vandalism. But this is only i partially true. No doubt our towns I (says the Pall Mall Gazette) have not one tithe of tbe historic interest they once possessed. The slums of old Plymouth or Bristol were a museum of historic associations and architectural beauty, j but a traveller who wished to study past I history in the actual remains of other I ages would probably have begun with : relics of comparatively modern times, j possibly a Saxon church, like that at j Jarrow, or near Bishop Auckland, or an ( earth fort like those that crown the Berkshire downs. Roman remains were fruitful topics of antiquarian speculation, • but lay undisturbed under the green grass, and what earlier remains there were above ground in menhirs of cromlechs were chiefly of interest to the walltnuker and builder. Now the spade has | 1 not not only familiarised us with Roman i camps, but we know enough of races thou- I sands of years before them to picture their j manner of life. In some parts of England . we can picture the country as it was 5000 ' years ago, perhaps, when human beings could only find a safe dwelling-place on 1 the open upland moors, -while the fertile valleys were given over to jungle and wild beasts. The visitor to Gnmsponnd, on Dartmoor, can realise what careful scientific investigation has done in preserving the past. The hut which has been restored by the labours of the wellknown novelist Mr Baring-Gould and other Dartmoor enthusiafts enables us , fairly accurately to picture the life of the ! people who lived there. The little round hut, perhaps 12ft. in diameter, ( with its doorway sheltered by a passage, ( its walls of boulders, and interior paved i ( over one section for sleeping-places, its , cooking-hole and cooking-stones and the [ great pound which surrounds it all, is a ' , wonderful revelation of* the past. On i Dartmoor two great forces have been at j , work, one destructive and the other j j preservative. The former force of the past has been the hopo of' gain, which { has caused ruthless destruction of memorials of other ages for the sake of utilising their materials, or, in the case of cairns and barrowrs, in the hope of j j finding treasure. The preservative force J has been superstition. j Superstition has coloured even some forms of antiquarianism with romance, i f not to say with danger. The former of ] ono of the lai-gest collections of urns ' from tumuli, now in the British Mu3eum, i tulls :i story of a curious experience in | tho west of Soniliind. LTe had come to c n'i'vrintend i\m opening of three !;irgo t

barrows on a friend's estate, and a gang of countrymen had been collected to do the necessary excavation, but as none of them could speak anything but their native Gaelic, their foreman had to act as interpreter. One day the men seemed to work with great reluctance, and it was explained that as they had heard that the object of the work was to find skeletons, their Highland superstition had been excited. That day they came to the first kistvaen, ?nd none of the men would touch it ; bo it had to be cleared by the explorer himself and the foreman. The next day when he came to work, the antiquary found the men standing aside in a threatening group, and the foreman in. degpair. The night before,- it appeared, a villager returniug from market had seen a dragon with flaming eyes issue from the desecrated barrow — a sure sign of misfortune for the countryside. No promise of reward could induce a single labourer to handle pick or shovel, and when the antiquary tried to incite them by personal example, the foreman begged him to stop, as his very life would be in danger if he persisted. The attempt to explore the barrows had to be abandoned, and the mischief did not end there. The road which passed by the barrows itself fell into disuse for years, and the villagers walked three miles around to market for years after rather than pass these desecrated graves. This superstitious fear of the dead survived almost as long in the extreme west of England as in Scotland on the Highland border. Westcote, in his " View of Dartmoor," tells us how a labouring man who was building himself a house on the waste land, fetched earth and stones from one of the barrows, and having pierced into the bowels of the hillock he found therein a little place as it had been a large oven, fairly strongly and closely willed up. In the hope of treasure he plied his work earnestly, until he had broken a hole through the wall, in the cavity whereof he espied an earthen pot, which caused him to multiply his strokes, in order to make tho orifice large enough to take out the pot. As he thrust in his arm and fastened his hand thereon, he suddenly heard, or seemed to hear, the nois« of the trampling and treading of horses coming, as he thought, towards him, which caused him to forbear and arise from his place, fearing that the comers would take his purchase from him. But looking about every way, he saw neither horse nor man in view. "To the pot again he goes, but this happened a second and yet a third time. The third time he brings it away, but found therein only a few ashes or bones. But the man, whether from fear, which yet he denies, or other cause, in a very short time after lost senses both of sight and hearing, and, in less than three months' consuming, died. In Wensleydale a barrow wac long preserved from destruction by the legend that a large black raven guarded some treasure which was hidden in the mound. The peculiar form which the tradition took is interesting, as no doubt the famous symbol of the North, was that under which the buried chief had fought. 1 These superstitions, if they have from j time to time proved troublesome to antiI quaries have been of greet service to the j country, as they have preserved until our j scientific age memorials which would i otherwise have been destroyed. When one sees what were obviously old menhir stones used as gate-posts, or sockets of ancient crosses built into hedges, one cannot help wishing that superstitution had been ten times stronger in those remote local ties where the ground has been left undisturbed by the pfough.