Even the little children of Ogbury village have noticed
its close resemblance of shape and outline to the grassy hillocks in
their own churchyard, and whisper to one another when they play upon its
summit that a great giant in golden armour lies buried in a stone vault
underneath. But if only they knew the real truth, they would say instead
that that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of a short,
squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature to the Lapps and
Finns, and about as much unlike a giant as human nature could easily
manage. It maybe regarded as a general truth of history that the
greatest men don't by any means always get the biggest monument.
The archaeologists in becoming prints who went with us to the top of
Ogbury Barrows sagaciously surmised (with demonstrative parasol) that
'these mounds must have been made a very long time ago, indeed.' So in
fact they were: but though they stand now so close together, and look so
much like sisters and contemporaries, one is ages older than the other,
and was already green and grass-grown with immemorial antiquity when the
fresh earth of its neighbour tumulus was first thrown up by its side,
above the buried urn of some long-forgotten Celtic warrior. Let us begin
by considering the oldest first, and then pass on to its younger sister.
Ogbury Long Barrow is a very ancient monument indeed. Not, to be sure,
one quarter so ancient as the days of the extremely old master who
carved the mammoth on the fragments of his own tusk in the caves of the
Dordogne, and concerning whom I have indited a discourse in an earlier
portion of this volume: compared with that very antique personage, our
long barrow on Ogbury hill-top may in fact be looked upon as almost
modern.
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