lake habitation, constructed on piles. Safe in their island home, the occupants of the Duddingston pile dwellings sojourned under the shadow of Arthur Seat, and buried their dead on the neighbouring slopes. But the day of doom came at last. Dr Thomson speaks of the piles looking as if they had been charred. The effeCt of the fire is still more manifest on the half-melted bronze weapons dredged up from the loch. Their condition suggests the idea of a pile village of ample proportions and substantial structure, which yielded slowly to the fury of the flames, and so subjected its armoury to a protracted conflagration before the half-melted weapons sank hissing to the bottom of the lake. Invaded, whether by neighbouring tribes or by foreign intruders, the lake dwellers perished with their ingEniously constructed habitations, and when next the banks of the little lake attracted settlers, and a village arose where the old Norman Church overhangs the lake, and the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep, new arts, and another race had supplanted those of the bronze workers of Duddingston. It is not to be doubted, however, that many curious relics still lie undisturbed among the roots of the piles, and it was one of the favourite projects of Sir James Y. Simpson to have the site of the pile village explored, and so to determine by the recovered relics some ample details of the arts and habits of the primitive lake dwellers of Arthur Seat.” Sir Daniel’s views have been ably supported by Dr Robert Chambers, Lord Rosehill, and others.
Compared with these early setTlers and bronze workers of the pile driving age, the Gael or Pict of Roman times appears but of yesterday. The progress of primitive civilization had been slow, and yet it had its peculiarities and its haracteristics. The habits and customs of the natives were to their Roman conquerors rude and barbarous, but there are not wanting evidences that even then some progress in the arts of domestic life had been made. Stone querns or hand mills, vessels of bronze consisting of various culinary, and domestic utensils, such as pots, caldrons, tripods, goblets and bowls, horns and drinking cups, earthenware, plain and decorated, both for domestic use and for religious worship, sepulchral vases and urns, personal ornaments of horn, teeth of animals, jet or shale, with beads of glass and pebble have frequently been found in sepulchral deposits in various parts of the parish.
