The last class of personal ornaments of the Late-Celtic period to be noticed are the armlets. The most remarkable of these are of the Scottish type, as it may fairly be called, only one specimen having been found outside Scotland.[222] The armlets of this type are very heavy and massive, and their general form appears to have been suggested by a coiled serpent; as in the one from the Culbin Sands, Nairnshire, the ends of the coil terminate in actual serpents’ heads. The armlets are usually found in pairs, and are highly ornamented with flamboyant work, and in some cases enamelled. Although they are of cast bronze, the style of the decoration is evidently copied from the repoussé designs of the wrought metalwork of the period. Dr. J. Anderson has devoted a considerable portion of his Rhind Lectures on Scotland in Pagan Times: Iron Age, to the examination of the Scottish group of armlets, most of which are in the Edinburgh Museum. The following is a list of the known examples:—

List of Localities where Armlets of the
Scottish Type have been found.

The armlet from Stanhope, Peeblesshire, was associated with a Romano-British saucepan, which suggests that this type belongs to the later part of the Celtic Pagan Iron Age.

Bronze armlets of La Tène, or continental type, have been derived from the burial mounds at Cowlam and Arras, Yorkshire. The bronze armlet from the Stamford Hill Cemetery, near Plymouth, is jointed like the collars, and decorated with flamboyant work.

A pair of penannular ring armlets of silver terminating in serpents’ heads, which may possibly be Late-Celtic, was disposed of at the sale of the Bateman Collection from Lomberdale House, Derbyshire. They were found at Castlethorpe,[223] Buckinghamshire, in 1827, in a small urn containing Roman silver and brass coins, none later than the reign of Verus (A.D. 161-169), and a massive silver ring set with a carnelian engraved with a figure of Bonus Eventus. A similar pair of base silver armlets were found near the Carlswark Cavern,[224] in Middleton Dale, Derbyshire.

Three very elegant armlets of twisted and looped bronze wire were associated with a Late-Celtic burial outside Thirst House Cave,[225] Deepdale, Derbyshire. Armlets of the same make are illustrated in Lidenschmit’s Alterthümer, (vol. ii., pt. 5, pl. 3).

The Late-Celtic toilet accessories are of three kinds, namely, hand-mirrors, hair-combs, and châtelaines. The mirrors are of bronze and circular in shape, with an ornamental handle. The back, or unpolished face of the mirror, is in nearly all cases decorated with incised circles of different sizes, combined with curved lines and a peculiar sort of background filled in with cross-hatching. A list of mirrors such as those described is given below.

List of Localities where Late-Celtic
Mirrors have been found.

Unornamented mirrors have been found with burials at Arras,[226] Yorkshire, and Gilton,[227] Kent.

The hair-combs are of bone, and will therefore be described subsequently when dealing with bonework.

The châtelaines of the Late-Celtic period are pretty little objects of bronze, generally enamelled. At the top is a loop for suspension; there is a little rod below, from which are hung tweezers, picks, files, etc. Specimens have been discovered in the Thirst House Cave,[228] Deepdale, Derbyshire, and at Canterbury,[229] and Craven Arms,[230] Shropshire.

The domestic utensils and cooking appliances of the Late-Celtic period include wooden tankards and buckets with bronze mountings, bronze bowls and saucepans, and iron fire-dogs. Some of the riveted caldrons possibly also belong to this period, but as they cannot be distinguished from those of the Bronze Age it will be unnecessary to describe them here.

There is a very perfect wooden tankard mounted with bronze in the Mayer Museum, Liverpool, from Trawsfynydd,[231] Merionethshire, having a handle ornamented in the Late-Celtic style with flamboyant tracery, which might easily be mistaken for Gothic work of the fourteenth century were it not for the trumpet-shaped expansions which occur in the details. Handles of similar tankards have been found at Aylesford,[232] Kent; Elveden,[233] Essex; Okstrow,[234] Orkney; and Carlingwark Loch,[235] Kirkcudbrightshire.

Late-Celtic wooden buckets with bronze mountings are of the greatest rarity, so much so that only two are known to exist, one from Aylesford,[236] Kent, in the British Museum, and the other from Marlborough,[237] Wilts, in the Devizes Museum. They are both decorated with repoussé designs representing men, animals, etc., treated much in the same way as on the Ancient British and Gaulish coins of the same period.

Bronze bowls have been frequently found on Late-Celtic inhabited sites and with Late-Celtic burials. A quite plain but extremely well-made bronze bowl is to be seen in the British Museum side by side with the beaded torque from Lochar Moss,[238] Dumfriesshire, which accompanied it. There is another plain bowl in the Gloucester Museum which was associated with the burial at Birdlip,[239] Gloucestershire, already described. A bronze bowl ornamented with projecting bosses is amongst the objects derived from the Glastonbury[240] Marsh Village; and a bowl in the Dublin Museum from Keshkerrigan,[241] Co. Leitrim, has a very characteristic Late-Celtic handle in the form of a beast made up of flamboyant curves. A special type of bronze bowls with zoömorphic handles and enamelled decorations will be dealt with subsequently.

Most of the saucepans in use during the Late-Celtic period were either imported from Italy and Gaul or were so nearly copied by local metalworkers as to be indistinguishable from the originals. None of these saucepans, as far as I am aware, have Celtic decoration upon them, although several are inscribed with Celtic names, and others are highly enamelled. Two specimens in the British Museum are of exceptional interest, one of bronze enamelled and inscribed with the name “BODVOGENVS,” from Prickwillow,[242] near Ely, Cambridgeshire, and the other of silver, with a highly ornamented inscribed handle, which was found at Backworth,[243] Northumberland, with the pair of Kelto-Roman fibulæ previously mentioned. The more elaborate saucepans were probably used in connection with religious ceremonies and not for cooking, as is borne out by the dedicatory inscriptions upon the handles and the circumstances under which many of them have been found. A list has already been given of the saucepans associated with finds of Late-Celtic objects.

The metalworkers of the Late-Celtic period were not only capable of executing some of the finest pieces of repoussé bronze that the world has ever seen, but they also excelled in producing works of art in wrought-iron of great merit. As an example of their skill in this direction we have the remarkable pair of fire-dogs from Capel Garmon, Denbighshire,[244] now in the possession of Colonel Wynne Finch of Pentre Voelas, near Bettws-y-coed. The fire-dogs consist of two upright bars, each surmounted by the head of a beast with horns, and standing on an arched foot, connected near the bottom by a horizontal bar on which to rest the logs of wood used for the fire. The uprights are ornamented on each side with thinner pieces of iron bent into undulations and scrolls, and fixed to the uprights at intervals with rivets having large round heads.

Each of the beasts’ heads has a very curious sort of crest ornamented with a row of circular holes and round knobs. Other fire-dogs of the same kind, made of plain iron bars, and with horned beasts’ heads on the top of the uprights (each horn terminating in a round knob), have been found at Mount Bures,[245] Essex, Hay Hill,[246] near Cambridge, and Stamfordbury,[247] Bedfordshire, associated with Romano-British burials.

The only objects of the Late-Celtic period which may conjecturally have been used for religious purposes are the little bronze figures of animals from Hounslow,[248] Middlesex, now in the British Museum.

Under the head of musical instruments come the bone flutes from Thor’s Cave, Staffordshire, and the magnificent bronze trumpet found in 1794 at Loughnashade, Co. Armagh, and now in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin. Most of the trumpets of this kind are of the Bronze Age, but the style of the decoration on the annular disc at the mouth of the one from Loughnashade shows clearly that it is of the Iron Age.[249]

Amongst the objects of unknown use of the Late-Celtic period are certain so-called spoons, some peculiar disc-and-hook ornaments, and a few highly ornamented circular pieces of repoussé bronze with a cup-shaped depression nearly in the centre.

The spoon-like objects have been very fully dealt with in a paper by Mr. Albert Way in the Archæological Journal (vol. xxvi., p. 52), and below is given a list of all the known specimens.

List of Localities where Spoon-like Objects with
Late-Celtic Decoration have been found.

The body of these objects is shaped like a very shallow spoon with a pointed end, and the handle (if such it may be called) is circular or nearly circular, in many cases with two little round ears or projections at each side. The so-called spoons are generally found in pairs, one spoon having a cruciform design in the middle of the bowl; whilst its fellow has a small hole bored through the edge of the bowl. The handles of the spoons are always ornamented, sometimes on the front only, but more commonly on the back as well.

There are specimens of the other Late-Celtic objects of unknown use—namely, the hook-and-disc ornaments[250] and the circular piecesof repoussé metalwork with a cup-shaped depression—in the British Museum[251] and the Dublin Museum.[252]

No satisfactory explanation has been given of the use of certain wheel and triskele pendants of which examples have been found in Berkshire, Kingsholm, near Gloucester, Hunsbury, N. Hants, Seamill Fort, Ayrshire, and Treceiri, Carnarvonshire.

POTTERY AND GLASS

The pottery of the Late-Celtic period differs from that of the Bronze Age in being turned on a wheel instead of being handmade. The firing is also better done, and the quality of the ware superior in every way. Since the discovery of the Aylesford cemetery in Kent, in 1886, it has been possible to differentiate Late-Celtic pottery from Romano-British by the peculiar forms of the vases. Dr. Arthur Evans has dealt with this subject pretty exhaustively in his paper in the Archæologia (vol. lii., p. 315).

The most characteristic of the Aylesford urns is tall, with a narrow base and wide mouth. The base is in the shape of a low truncated cone, the top of which is the narrowest part of the vase, and from this point it gradually gets wider until the top rim is nearly reached, when it contracts again slightly. The curve thus produced is of such extreme elegance as to at once suggest a classical origin. The exterior surface of some of these pots is plain, but in many cases it is divided into bands by horizontal projecting bead mouldings. Dr. A. Evans does not find much difficulty in showing that the peculiarities of form can be directly traced to the metal situlæ from which the vases were copied. With regard to this, he says:—

“In most cases these (i.e. the Aylesford) vases, which for elegance of form may almost vie with the ceramic products of Italy or Greece, are divided into zones by the small raised ridges or cordons described above, the zones themselves being, in turn, decorated with finely incised linear striations. This type of vase, beautiful as it is in itself, is still more interesting from the comparisons to which it inevitably leads us. No one familiar with the ceramic forms of an important group of North-Italian cemeteries, belonging, for the most part, to the fourth or fifth centuries before our era, and of which the whole series of objects so admirably excavated and arranged by Professor Prosdocimi at Este[253] forms the most splendid illustration, can fail to be struck with the manifold points of resemblance presented by the urns before us with the most characteristic of the vase-types there represented. The contour of the type referred to, with its shoulders sometimes angular, sometimes abruptly rounded off, its inverted conical body divided into vertical zones by raised cordons, and tapering off to a pedestal below, can only be described as identical with that of some of the finest of the Aylesford specimens. The only perceptible difference is that, whereas the British urns are almost uniformly covered with a black or brown coating—the colouring matter may have been supplied by pounded charcoal—zones of the Euganean cineraries are coloured alternately with bands of graphite and red ochre. Some of the earlier of the Este vases are, however, of plain dark brown bucchero, and others, again, of later date, of an uniform red or grey. These North-Italian parallels have a still further value, inasmuch as they throw the clearest possible light on the actual genesis of this type. The cordoned vases of Este are, in fact, nothing more than copies in clay of certain forms of bronze situlæ; the commonest form of these, which is distributed through the whole of the geographical area where these vases are discovered, is zoned in the same way as the pots, the zones answering to an universal method of early metal industry, in accordance with which vessels were built up of bands of thin metal riveted together at the edges, each zone being often, in turn, defined by cordons or beads of metal. These cordons themselves in their more prominent form represent the wooden rings that surrounded and kept together the framework of wooden staves, to which in early times the metal plates themselves were riveted.”

Besides the pedestalled vases from Aylesford,[254] made in imitation of the cordoned situlæ of bronze from the North-Italian region, there are others, perhaps derived from them, with elegantly formed bases. There are also vases without pedestals, and having somewhat globular bodies as well as bowl-shaped and saucer-shaped pots. Most of these are now in the British Museum.

The following list gives the finds of pottery of a similar kind:—

List of Localities where Finds of Late-Celtic Pottery
of the Aylesford Type have been made.

Another class of pottery is recognised to belong to the Late-Celtic period, not so much by the forms of the vases (because most of them are in a very fragmentary condition) as by the patterns upon them, which consist of incised curved lines, circles, dots, and different kinds of cross-hatching and shading. A list of the finds is given below.

List of Localities where Finds of Late-Celtic Pottery,
ornamented with Incised Lines, Circles, Dots,
and Shading have been made.

Those who wish to compare the Late-Celtic pottery of Britain with Gaulish pottery of the same character may, with advantage, consult the Dictionnaire Archéologique de la Gaule, and Paul du Chatellier’s La Poterie aux époques préhistoriques et gauloise en Armorique.

As far as the available evidence goes, glass does not seem to have been used for any other purpose by the Late-Celtic people except the manufacture of personal ornaments, the most important of which were beads for necklaces. Some of the beads from Ireland and Scotland, specimens of which may be seen in the museums at Dublin and Edinburgh, are most artistically fashioned from twisted rods of glass of variegated colour bent into peculiar shapes. They have been obtained from the Irish crannogs at Lagore, Co. Meath, and Lough Ravel.

A bracelet of green glass, with a cable-like ornament in white and blue strands surrounding its outer surface, was found a few years ago in the crannog at Hyndford, Co. Lanark.

WOODWORK, BONEWORK, AND THE
KIMMERIDGE SHALE INDUSTRY

Owing to the perishable nature of the material very few examples of carved woodwork of the Late-Celtic period are now in existence. Those which we do possess have been derived from the Glastonbury Marsh Village and from the crannog at Lochlee, Ayrshire. Mr. Arthur Bulleid, F.S.A., has illustrated three specimens in an article on “Some Decorated Woodwork from the Glastonbury Lake Village” in the Antiquary for April, 1895, p. 109. No. 1 was dug up from the peat at a depth of 6 feet 6 inches below the surface, near the south-east edge of the village. It is a rectangular piece of wood dressed smooth all over, 1 foot 7 inches long by 3¾ inches wide by ⅛ inch thick, decorated on one side with a step-pattern shaded after the fashion of chequerwork, with a cross-hatching of diagonal lines. No. 2 is the stave of a small bucket, which, when complete, must have been 7 inches high by 5½ inches in diameter, decorated with a lozenge pattern shaded with parallel straight lines. No. 3 is a portion of a tub 6 inches high by 1 foot in diameter, cut out of a solid piece of ash, and having its exterior surface decorated with flowing lines of extreme beauty, resembling scrolls of foliage converted into geometrical ornament by successive copying. Where the flowing lines diverge, the trumpet-shaped expansions are shaded with diagonal cross-hatching and dots. There is a good model of this tub in the British Museum. The designs on the woodwork from Glastonbury are produced by incising the surface with some fine sharp-pointed tool, and afterwards burnt in by passing a heated piece of metal along the incisions.

The specimen from the Lochlee crannog, which is illustrated in Dr. R. Munro’s Ancient Scottish Lake-Dwellings (p. 134), is a piece of ash 5 inches square, ornamented on one side with a triple spiral, and on the other with Late-Celtic flamboyant work.

A wooden bowl with a carved handle, found in a bog near Rathconrath, Co. Westmeath, and now in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, may possibly belong to the same category.

Amongst the objects of bone belonging to the Late-Celtic period the most remarkable are the spatulæ, or flakes, of which no less than 5,000 are said to have been derived from cairn H of the Slieve-na-Caillighe series, near Oldcastle, Co. Meath. These chambered cairns were in the first instance erected as burial-places at the end of the Neolithic Age or the beginning of the Bronze Age, and the one marked H on the plan given in the Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot. (vol. xxvi., p. 294) appears to have been used as a workshop by an artificer in bone during the Early Iron Age. Ninety-one of the bone spatulæ from the cairn in question were engraved by compass, with circles, curves, and ornamental puncturings, and twelve were decorated on both sides. Unfortunately the whole of the bones have been lost, and we only know what they were like from the illustrations in E. Conwell’s Tomb of Ollamh Fodhla (p. 53). A fragment of one of these bones which had been overlooked by the previous explorers of the cairn has recently been brought to light by Mr. E. Crofton Rotheram.[255] Perhaps the most interesting feature connected with the bones from Slieve-na-Caillighe is the discovery with them of the pair of iron compasses used in producing the incised designs upon them.

Besides the bones just described, the other principal objects of the same material belonging to the Late-Celtic period are certain toilet-combs and spoon-shaped fibulæ, or dress-fasteners. Bone combs with Late-Celtic ornament have been found on the inhabited site at Ghegan Rock, near Seacliff, Haddingtonshire, and in the crannogs at Lagore,[256] Co. Meath, Ballinderry,[257] Co. Westmeath; and at Longbank crannog on the Clyde, near Glasgow. Spoon-shaped fibulæ of bone have been derived from the Victoria Cave, Settle, the Kelko Cave, Giggleswick, and Dowkerbottom Cave, Arncliffe, Yorkshire. The ornament upon them consists of concentric circles and dots.[258]

In addition to wood and bone, the Late-Celtic people used Kimmeridge shale for the manufacture of objects, chiefly turned vases with cordons, like the Aylesford pots previously described. Vessels of this kind have been found at Old Warden,[259] Bedfordshire, Great Chesterford[260] and Colchester,[261] Essex, and Corfe Castle,[262] Dorset.

STONEWORK

Only three sculptured monuments decorated with Late-Celtic patterns are known to exist at present.[263] They are all in Ireland and are fully described by Mr. G. Coffey in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (vol. xxiv., sect. c, p. 257).