Note 899 — Chapter IV · (continued 2)

Mr. G. F. Tregelles (Vict. Hist. of ... Cornwall, i, 404) remarks that ‘the principal English [as distinguished from most Cumbrian and Scottish] circles have never been proved to be’ sepulchral; but neither have they been proved to be non-sepulchral. It is said (Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd ser., xix, 1902, p. 98) that the circle of Sunken Kirk in Westmorland has been subjected to a ‘searching exploration’. Was the whole area excavated? Pitt-Rivers (Excavations in Cranborne Chase, iv, 148), speaking of the fifty two secondary interments which he discovered just outside a barrow at Rushmore (see p. 178, supra) says, ‘They showed no trace whatever on the surface ... and would never have been discovered had it not been for the practice I have established of trenching down to the undisturbed chalk the entire surface of the ground contained within the area of the contoured plan of the Barrow’.

Mr. R. Burnard (Vict. Hist. of ... Devon, i, 359-60) observes that ‘fires seem to have been kindled all over the [Fernworthy] circle, for every scoop of the pick and shovel ... displayed charcoal’, and, remarking that this monument is the ‘predominant feature of a group of sepulchral remains’, conjectures that it was ‘the crematorium or the site of the funeral feasts or both’.