Welsh Journals

been attached to this settlement of the Celtic Heroic Age, practising what was the basic craft of the La Tene culture, could only carry out the roughest sort of job. These bits are all snaffles, of two-link and three-link types, suitable for animals of the pony class. Several are of iron, bronze-coated, made in eastern Britain; two, probably made in the Thames Valley, have links of solid bronze, but the rings are hollow, like curtain rings while one, a two-link bit which should derive from some workshop in the south-west, is of solid bronze throughout. These variations seem to reflect a steep rise in the price of Cornish tin and Irish copper, or of the alloy, as the raw material passed from merchant to merchant, from the Bristol Channel coast across the uplands and down the Thames Valley to eastern Britain. The bit illustrated has features of special interest. It reveals a plastic design which, taken as a whole, is new to Celtic art-history in this country. The variety of its mouldings is well shown in the photo- graph but for the delicacy and finish of its workmanship to be appreciated it must be seen. The appendage (a hollow disk) attached to one link-collar carried a stud of some brilliant material; such unilateral ornament shows that the bit was designed for a two-horse vehicle, in fact a chariot. It is indeed the best evidence which the collection affords for chariot warfare in Anglesey. Among the objects ornamented in relief were three small rectangular panels with S scrolls, and a lunate plaque; the latter, which may be a trumpet frontal, shows a triquetra balanced but asymmetrical, in a circle flanked by large lobes. This design, abstract, accomplished, inhuman, but strangely attractive, is very characteristic of Celtic art in Britain. The bollard or pole-tip, a heavy but finely modelled bronze casting which was one of the metal fixtures of a wheeled vehicle, has on the diaphragm which closes its top, a swastika delicately stippled-swastikas similarly shaped are framed in red enamel on the famous Battersea shield in the British Museum. The series of moulded 5in. rings of bronze, identified as nave-hoops are decorated successors of the strong bands of iron whose function it was, and is, to prevent the hub of the wheel from splitting; they range from a fairly heavy casting to light bands. of sheet metal. The currency bars," 19in. to 2ft. long, pose a pretty problem of function. Such bars, which were probably made of Forest of Dean iron, circulated in south-west Britain, mainly in the first century B.C.