BARROWS, in British topography, artificial hills or mounts, met with in many parts of Britain, and supposed to have been Roman tumuli, or sepulchral monuments of the ancient Britons. They are either of stones heaped up, or of earth. For the former, more generally known by the name of cairns, see CAIRNS.—Of the latter Dr Plott takes notice of two sorts in Oxfordshire: one placed on the military ways; the other in the fields, meadows, or woods; the first sort doubtless of Roman erection, the other more probably erected by the Britons or Danes. We have an exa-
(B) There is another anecdote told of him, which not only shewed his intrepidity, but an uncommon goodness of disposition, in circumstances where an ordinary share of it would have been probably extinguished. He was once in a gentleman's house in the country, where the necessary was at the end of a long garden, and consequently at a great distance from the room where he lodged: as he was going to it before day, for he was a very early riser, a fierce mastiff, who used to be chained up all day, and let loose at night for the security of the house, perceiving a strange person in the garden at that unseasonable time, set upon him with great fury. The doctor caught him by the throat, threw him, and lay upon him; and whilst he kept him down, considered what he should do in that exigence: once he had a mind to kill him; but he altered this resolution, upon recollecting that this would be unjust, since the dog did only his duty, and he himself was in fault for rambling out of his room before it was light. At length he called out so loud, that he was heard by some of the house, who came presently out, and freed the doctor and the dog from the danger they were both in.
examination of the barrows in Cornwall by Dr Williams, in the Phil. Trans. No 458. from whose observations we find that they are composed of foreign or adventitious earth; that is, such as does not rise on the place, but is fetched from some distance. Monuments of this kind are also very frequent in Scotland. On digging into the barrows, urns have been found in some of them, made of calcined earth, and containing burnt bones and ashes; in others, stone chests containing bones entire; in others, bones neither lodged in chests nor deposited in urns. These tumuli are round, not greatly elevated, and generally at their basis surrounded with a foss. They are of different sizes; in proportion, it is supposed, to the greatness, rank, and power, of the deceased person.
Ancient Greece and Latium concurred in the same practice with the natives of this island. Patroclus among the Greeks, and Hector among the Trojans, received but the same funeral honours with our Caledonian heroes; and the ashes of Dercennus the Laurentine monarch had the same simple protection. The urn and pall of the Trojan warrior might perhaps be more superb than those of a British leader: the rising monument of each had the common materials from our mother earth.
The snowy bones his friends and brothers place,
With tears collected, in a golden vase.
The golden vase in purple palls they roll'd
Of softest texture and inwrought with gold.
Last o'er the urn the sacred earth they spread,
And rais'd a tomb, memorial of the dead.
Pope's Homer's Iliad, xxiv. 1003.
Or, as it is more strongly expressed by the same elegant translator, in the account of the funeral of Patroclus;
High in the midst they heap the swelling bed
Of rising earth, memorial of the dead. Id. xxiii. 319.
Barrow, in the salt-works, are wicker-cases, almost in the shape of a sugar-loaf, wherein the salt is put to drain.