IN CADBURY CASTLE, DEVON. 197

Shafts of tliis description, fr('(|ueiitly designated as " rub- bish-holes, " and considered by some to liave been places of sepulture, wells, or store-houses for grain, resembling the silos of modern times, have been fomid in Thanet and various ])laces in Kent, as also repeatedly in London. The Hon. Richard Neville* has recently noticed one of these receptacles at Chesterford, and a detailed account of a remarkable dis- covery of several such shafts sunk in chalk rock at Ewell in Surrey, has recently been communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by Mr. Diamond, and printed in the Archaeologia, vol. xxxii. p. 451. Similar "rubbish-holes," containing bones, fragments of pottery, and remains of the most miscellaneous nature, have been noticed by Mr. Trollope in several places near the east gate, Lincoln, a site abounding in vestiges of the Roman age. In connection vi^ith these curious remains a passage in the description of ancient Perth, given by Pennant, may well deserve to be noticed. He states that, in the pre- cipitous banks of the river Almond, at its junction with the Tay, the site of the ancient Bertha, where the Romans had a station, antiquities of their times frequently were brought to light by the fall of the cliffs. " Other falls," he observes, " have produced discoveries still more singular, and have laid open a species of interment, as far as I know, hitherto unnoticed. Some years ago in the face of a broken bank, were discovered six pillars in a line, ten feet distance from one another, and eighteen feet high from the top of the ground to the bed of the Almond, shewing out of the bank a semicircular face. These proved to have been the contents of certain cylindrical pits, sunk in the earth as places of sepulture. The urns were placed in them, and the hollows filled in with earth of a different kind from the banks, and so strongly rammed in as to remain coherent, after the former had in part been washed away. The Rev. Mr. Duff has de- scribed these hollows in a manner somewhat different, com- paring them to the segments of a cone, with the broader end downwards, and to have been filled with bones, ashes, and •1 TJie store places for grain at the city the grain will keep perfectly sound for a of Valetta, ^^alta, made during the rule of length of time ; the rock is naturally dry, the Grand- Masters in that island, consist and the climate remarkably so. of deep chambers excavated in the natural ^ Mr. Neville has printed some in- rock; the access to each chamber is by one teresting memorials of his researches in small opening on the surface, which is Essex, entitled, " Antiqua Explorata," and closed by a stone cover cemented down so "Sepulchra Exposita." Saftron Walden, as to exclude the air. In these chambers G. Youngman. 8vo. 1847-48. VOL. V. D d