In Dorset the round barrows are generally found on the summits of the hills which run through the county, more particularly on the Ridgeway, which roughly follows the coast line from near Bridport to Swanage, where may be seen some hundreds of all sizes, from huge barrows over 100 feet in diameter and 15 feet in height to small mounds, so little raised above the surface that only the tell-tale shadows cast by the rising or setting sun show where a former inhabitant lies buried. In the western part of the county they may be traced from Kingston Russell to Agger-Dun, through Sydling and Cerne Abbas to Bulbarrow, and in the east, from Swanage Bay to Bere Regis; and also near Dorchester, Wimborne, Blandford, and other places. In the Bronze Age cremation and inhumation were both practised; but in Dorset burials by cremation are the more common. The cremated remains were sometimes placed in a hole or on the surface line, with nothing to protect them from the weight of the barrow above; at other times they were covered by flat slabs of stone, built in the form of a small closed chamber or cist. Often they were placed on a flat piece of stone, and covered with an inverted urn, or put in an urn, with a covering slab over them; and they have been found wrapped in an animal’s skin, or in a bag of some woven material, or even in a wooden coffin. The inhumed bodies are nearly always found in a contracted posture, with the knees drawn up towards the chin; and a larger number face either east, south or west, than north. In the case of an inhumation, when the body was deposited below the old surface level, the grave was often neatly hewn and sometimes lined with slabs of stone, and it was the common custom to pile a heap of flints over it, affording a protection from wild animals; above the flints was heaped the main portion of the mound, which consisted of mould and chalk rubble. A ditch, with or without a causeway,[6] usually surrounds each barrow, but is so often silted up that no trace of it can be seen on the surface; it probably helped to supply the chalk rubble of the barrow. Bronze Age sepulchral pottery, which is hand-made, often imperfectly baked and unglazed, has been divided into four classes: the beaker or drinking vessel, the food vessel, the incense cup, and the cinerary urn. The two former are usually associated with inhumations; the two latter with cremations. As a type of prehistoric ceramic art in Britain, the Hon. J. Abercromby says that the beaker is the earliest, and the cinerary urn the latest.[7]