The earliest authentic records of Britain refer to its inhabitants as expert basket makers; their houses were made of willows and reeds; their fences and fortifications were living trees, with intertwisted branches; their boats were baskets, covered with skins; their domestic furniture, defensive armour, even the images employed in their erroneous religion, were each of wicker-work; and though we have no absolute proof that such was the case, it is at least probable that those famous chariots so formidable to the Roman invaders were similarly constructed, for it appears altogether impossible that the feats recorded of these celebrated charioteers could have been performed with carriages of wood and iron; though if we can suppose them to have been of small size, constructed of elastic wicker-work, and placed upon low wheels, the accounts of their marvellous movements become reasonable, and within the bounds of credibility. The monastic historians of the succeeding ages continue to mention wicker-work as the principal architectural material used in Britain and Ireland, not only for the rude dwellings of the inhabitants, but also for their more important public edifices and churches. Thus we find that so late as the sixth century Dermot MacKervel assisted “the Abbot St. Keyran to make a house to dwell in” by “thrusting down the peirs or wattles” of which it was made.[5] The monastery founded by St. Columba in the same century, though of much theological repute, must have had little material grandeur, as it is known that the great apostle of the Scots “sent forth his monks to gather twigs to build their hospice,” and the abode of St. Woloc, a bishop of the same age, was “a simple hut of wattles.” Glastonbury, supposed to have been the earliest Christian church in England, was, on the authority of William of Malmesbury,[6] “a mean structure of wattle-work;” and there are numerous other references to churches and monasteries constructed altogether or in part of the same material. Vestiges of such structures are now occasionally met with, which verify the records of the Roman and Mediæval historians. Recently, on the Etive in Argyleshire, the progress of agricultural improvement has uncovered rough pavements of stone, bearing marks of fire strewed with charred ashes, surrounded with the remains of hazel stakes, the relics of the frame-work of ancient Caledonian hearths, which have been concealed for centuries under a cover of eight or ten feet of moss.[7]