THE eighth volume of the third series is distinguished from the preceding ones by the interesting notices which it contains of early British works in Northumberland and the Hebrides. These subjects are not decidedly Welsh, in the modern acceptation of that name; and yet they are so intimately connected with the history of the ancient tribes peopling these islands, that they cannot be considered as foreign to the study of Cambrian antiquities. By the kindness of Sir John Romilly, the Master of the Rolls, and T. Duffus Hardy, Esq., Deputy Keeper, the Association has been allowed to transcribe and publish a Latin Chronicle of the thirteenth century, found at the end of the Exchequer Domesday, which was most probably compiled in one of the great Reli gious Houses of South Wales,-Margam or Neath. It will be found in this volume. At the end of the volume is inserted the Report of the Annual Meeting held at Truro. Archaeologia Cambrensis. THIRD SERIES, No. XXIX.-JANUARY, 1862. ON THE CONSTRUCTION OF "GIANTS' HOUSES," OR "CROMLECHS." By H.M. FREDERICK VII, KING OF DENMARK. 1857. WE are indebted to the kindness of the august President and the members of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries at Copenhagen, for permission to reprint from their Transactions the following highly interesting paper. The engravings with which it is illustrated come to us from the same source. In translating it we have adhered as closely as possible to the original,—which has already made its appearance in several European languages. At the last annual meeting of the Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, which was held in our palace, the question was again mooted, how our ancestors, unprovided with the mechanical means of our own times, had been able, during the Age of Stone, to move the large masses of stone of which those sepulchral chambers, commonly called Giants' Houses, have been constructed; and especially how they had contrived to raise into their places the large overlying stones, or the stones which seem to cover the chambers in question.. Several years ago I brought forward my own opinion on this subject it was at the meeting of the Society on March 21st, 1853. I did not, however, at that time consider this opinion as anything else than a first attempt to explain that at which every body cannot but feel surprised; and I soon discovered that this explanation required to be much more extensively developed. It 3RD SER., VOL. VIII. (RECAP) 1 is for this reason that I have profited by some of my leisure hours to revert to this subject, which I have looked upon from several points of view, and of which I shall now, perhaps, be able to give a more correct and a more complete account. In my former explanation I specially confined myself to the clearing up of one point,-how it was that the men of the Age of Stone had been able to raise these great overlying stones up to the height of the sepulchral chamber; but I now wish to express my opinion upon the construction of the whole chamber itself. And this is the way in which I intend to treat of it: how the materials were got: how they were worked how they were carried and how they were built up. I was once of opinion that, during the Age of Stone, people had been, to a small extent, tied down in the choice of a place where they had to build a sepulchral chamber of a certain size, and that they had been forced to choose one where the large stone meant to overlie the others was already lying. I supposed that people did not trouble themselves to raise the stone, but that they hollowed out the earth from beneath its bed, so as to make a kind of room below it in the earth itself. By dint of reflection, however, I have now come to modify my opinion; so that I now think these sepulchral chambers could have been built in any place whatsoever. Before going into further details, I will begin by explaining what my opinion is based upon. In the first place it is by no means probable that the ancients could have been satisfied to leave to chance the determining of the spot where the sepulchral chamber was to be built. We have reason to suppose that the great boulders of granite formerly existed upon our plains in greater numbers than they do now; but we are bound also to suppose that in thickly peopled countries much use was made of them. And since it is probable that the chambers in question were built near to human habitations, the collections of large stones in such neighbourhoods must have been soon used up. Other stones must then of necessity have been brought from other spots. In the next place it will often be found that the sepulchral chamber was covered with small overlying stones seemingly placed there one after the other, a thing which could not have been done by one of those great physical disturbances to which, according to the geologists, we are obliged to attribute the distributing of the granite boulders over our country. In the third place, it ought to be remarked that the overlying stones almost always have the flat side turned downwards; whereas, when the large stones of our plains are dug up, it is almost always found that their unequal and pointed parts are |