Many of the numerous finds of this nature have disappeared in small private collections and out of the many barrows that have been explored only in a certain number of instances have any accurate records been taken.  It is thus a somewhat difficult task to discover how much or how little of the plunder of the burial mounds belongs to the Neolithic and how much to the Bronze and later ages.  The Neolithic people buried in long barrows which are by no means common in Yorkshire, but many of the round ones that have been thoroughly examined reveal no traces of metal, stone implements only being found in them.[1] In Mr. Thomas Bateman’s book, entitled “Ten Years’ Diggings,” there are details of two long barrows, sixty-three circular ones, and many others that had been already disturbed, which were systematically opened by Mr. James Ruddock of Pickering.  The fine collection of urns and other relics are, Mr. Bateman states, in his own possession, and are preserved at Lomberdale; but this was in 1861, and I have no knowledge of their subsequent fate.

[Footnote 1:  Greenwell, William.  “British Barrows,” p. 483.]

One of the few long barrows near Pickering, of which Canon Greenwell gives a detailed account, is situated near the Scamridge Dykes—­a series of remarkable mounds and ditches running for miles along the hills north of Ebberston.  It is highly interesting in connection with the origin of these extensive entrenchments to quote Canon Greenwell’s opinion.  He describes them as “forming part of a great system of fortification, apparently intended to protect from an invading body advancing from the east, and presenting many features in common with the wold entrenchments on the opposite side of the river Derwent....”  “The adjoining moor,” he says, “is thickly sprinkled with round barrows, all of which have, at some time or other, been opened, with what results I know not; while cultivation has, within the last few years (1877), destroyed a large number, the very sites of which can now only with great difficulty be distinguished.  On the surface of the ground flint implements are most abundant, and there is probably no place in England which has produced more arrow-points, scrapers, rubbers, and other stone articles, than the country in the neighbourhood of the Scamridge Dykes.”  The doubts as to the antiquity of the Dykes that have been raised need scarcely any stronger refutation, if I may venture an opinion, than that they exist in a piece of country so thickly strewn with implements of the Stone Age.  These entrenchments thus seem to point unerringly to the warfare of the early inhabitants of Yorkshire, and there can be little doubt that the Dykes were the scene of great intertribal struggles if the loss of such infinite quantities of weapons is to be adequately accounted for.

[Illustration:  The Scamridge Dykes above Troutsdale.]