In Galicia, barrows, locally known as _castros_, are very numerous. On one occasion four were pointed out to me during an hour’s drive. As Señor Villa Amil has remarked, they are too well fortified to be temples, and too numerous and too near together to be war camps. During the Middle Ages the Gallegans used them as forts; and earlier still, when defending themselves against the Romans, they made them their chief strongholds. These _castros_ are frequently mentioned in the _Historia Compostelana_, and always as fortresses. Señor Villa Amil concludes that they must have originally been, at one and the same time, both fortresses and towns. Strabo’s statement that the Celts lived in little villages close to one another supports this view. Some authors, taking the accessary for the principal, have called these _castros_, _mamoas_, or _modorras_; but _mamoas_ are, in fact, what archæologists have agreed to call _tumuli_. In the old Latin documents of Galicia these last are called _mamulas_ and _mamonas_. The most important articles found in these _mamoas_ are the so-called torcs, or torques, of massive gold, with coarse workmanship and very little ornamentation. Señor Villa Amil explains the paucity of iron instruments by the climatic conditions of the country, which he thinks lead to the total decomposition of iron weapons. Handmills of two pieces of granite have been found, very similar to those discovered in French caves. Though he has found many fragments of pottery, Señor Villa Amil has never come across a whole vase, and he takes this as a proof that the people who formed these tumuli could not have used funeral urns; the fragments are in almost every case of a material which gives them an undoubtedly historic character--they are of clay mixed with sand and scattered over with mica. Some iron instruments and some bronze jewellery, more finely worked than the gold torques, were found with these. Our friend concludes that the tumuli must be prehistoric citadels which continued to be used as fastnesses right down to the end of the Middle Ages. Melida states that on all the _mamoas_ of Galicia there have been found indications of the cremation of the dead. Señor Macineira has prepared a map of the _castros_ in the neighbourhood of Ortigueira (Galicia), showing which of them he considers to be of ante-Roman and which of Roman origin,[13] those of Roman origin being similar to our “Cæsar’s camps.” Many of them served as defences of the coast. They are oblong or circular in shape with double parapets, often showing that much thought must have been expended upon their construction. It is supposed that the ante-Roman ones were used as the residences of tribal chiefs as well as for sepulchres, while Druidical stones resembling those of Stonehenge are to be seen in several wild and mountainous spots, and huge heaps of stones like the cairns of Scotland and Ireland also testify to Celtic customs.