1 JANUARY 1954, Page 36

still be anything in or around them of interest to

the modern archaeologist or antiquarian. They were looted by the Romans who were looking for curios for their villas; Norman abbots ripped them open for the bones of saints whilst in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there was an epidemic of what is deliciously called "barrow surgery." Some of it was of a primitive kind: most of it was hasty. Dean Mere- _ wether, for instance, is reported to have opened between twenty and thirty large barrows on Marlborough Downs in less than a month in 1849. Yet nobody found treasure. What is to be found and learnt from the mounds is related in a most scholarly fashion by Mr. Grinsell. J. H.