A HISTORY OF BERKSHIRE
and a few other trinkets, and another was found with two brooches, originally with applied plates, 2^ inches in diameter, on the breast. Two circular gilt brooches of unusual form should here be mentioned : from an almost flat disc, which is lightly engraved, rises a vertical border, and a yellow glass paste fills a perforation in the centre. Two or three gilt square-headed brooches of medium size were also found, and three quoit-shaped specimens which are occasionally found in various districts. Of four glass vessels two were of conical form, one of dark brown colour had the peculiar hollow lobes generally confined to Kentish graves, and the fourth was a very delicate bowl almost colourless. Several perforated Roman coins for use as pendants were recovered as well as the stem of a characteristic Roman spoon ; and a remarkable survival from Roman times is seen in a pair of circular brooches with bosses in the centre, one of them consisting of a glass intaglio (fig. n) representing a raven with its head turned back. In another part of the railway cutting a cinerary urn is said to have been found. The vessel was broken in pieces by the workmen, and a precise description is there- fore impossible ; but there is no doubt as to the Anglo-Saxon character of a woman's grave in the same locality, which had been cut east and west and contained a number of coloured glass beads as well as a brooch of the saucer type, 1 such as that illustrated from Shefford (fig. 8). This is sufficient evidence that the Lambourn valley was occupied in early Anglo-Saxon times, and the ' Seven Barrows ' that once stood on the downs above, though richest in prehistoric relics, also contained many secondary interments that proved to be of Anglo-Saxon origin. A heavy bronze brooch (see fig.) like one already mentioned from Reading was found in one of these burials and presented to the British Museum by Canon Green well, who with the assist- ance of Mr. Walter Money undertook the exploration of the site in 1879. But most of the remains discovered in the county are from the neighbourhood of the Thames. An interesting series of Anglo-Saxon remains found near Read- ing is now in the municipal museum,* and the discovery was described by the late Dr. Joseph Stevens in i893 3 Two years previously a number of interments were exposed in a ballast-pit during the widening of the Great Western Railway, the site being little more than 200 yards south of the Thames and 50 feet above the river-level. A space of over 400 square yards between the railway bridge at the Rennet's mouth and the brick 1 Journ. of Brit. Arch. Asm. . 155. These were discovered in 1893 and are now in the Reading Museum. 2 By the gift of Mr. G. W. Smith, to whom the discovery is due.
- Journ. of Brit. Arch. Assoc. 1. 150 (2 plates).
240 BRONZE BROOCH, LAMBOURN DOWNS.
