to a point, and perforated with holes for attaching a handle to it by means of rivets. Bronze bucklers have also been found in various places, and some of wood full of brass nails. The circular Highland target is closely formed on the model of these bronze shields, even retaining the boss in the centre of the target, which was intended to receive and protect the hand, though the HighIanders, like the ancient Romans, wore the shield on the arm. "A striking instance,” says Sir Daniel Wilson, in his Pre-historic Annals of Scotland "of the tenacity with which Celtic races are found to cling to ancient customs.”
To whom did these relics originally belong? and how came they there? are questions more easily asked than answered. Were they the property of the old Caledonians, or of some anterior race whose name and story have been for ever lost, but whose property has survived them, and is remarkably dragged into the light of day in the reign of his august Majesty George III.?
We shall not attempt to answer what can at best be only a matter of merest conjecture—
"Their memory and their name are gone, Alike unknowing and unknown.”
And yet these spear heads, swords, rings, and lumps of brass have a story to tell. Sir Daniel Wilson in one of his works — Reminiscences of Edinburgh — has hazarded the opinion that Duddingston Loch was at one time, in long ages past, the site of a lake village; that there, on the very spot where this mass of metal had sunk, was not only a manufactory of brass weapons, but that the villagers had their huts built on strong piles driven into the water, for along with the weapons, were fished up from the bottom "humen skulls, the remains doubtless of the old artificers who there wrought cunningly in brass after the fashion of such primitive times.”
His evidence for thia theory is taken from a statement made to himself by Dr Thomson of Leamington, a son of the Rev. John Thomson, minister of Duddingston at the beginning of the century. "Dr Thomason,” he says, “recalls to memory that when in youthful days he went out with his father to fish or to sketch on the lake they were wont to secure their boats to wooden piles, which have long since disappeared. There, however, we may assume stood in some old century of Seotland’s bronze period, a
