Note 880 — Chapter IV · (continued 2)

I do not mean to suggest that all stone circles were derived from peristaliths; but I do not think that we should be justified in differentiating from the peristaliths by a hard and fast line those larger circles in which no traces of interment have been found. Mr. John Ward (Vict. Hist. of ... Derby, i, 169), remarking that most of the round barrows, or rather cairns, of Derbyshire consist merely of stones ‘thrown together anyhow’, says that ‘a slight advance is the introduction of a kerb of larger stones laid upon the ground to confine the proposed mound’; and he goes on to observe that in those cases in which the stones of the mound itself have been removed, the kerb ‘may remain as a ring of stones easily mistaken for a circle’. He evidently believes that the kerb was merely a structural improvement. Perhaps in Derbyshire, though even this is not certain. The object of the stone rings which have been found within cairns, and of those which stood upon barrows in Northern Germany, was certainly not utilitarian; and the kerb may have had a religious or mystical meaning. Nor is there any evidence that it was an ‘advance’ upon the structureless cairn.