Coming now to the mainland of Scotland, we find that one of these brooches is preserved in Ospisdale House, Sutherlandshire, of which there is no precise record; but there is every reason to conclude that it is one of a pair found somewhere in the neighbourhood. Another pair were found in a grave in the neighbourhood of Dunrobin Castle, and the under shells of them are preserved in the Duke of Sutherland’s museum there. [Illustration: Fig. 32.—Bowl-shaped Brooch, found with a Skeleton at Castletown, Caithness (4½ inches in length).] In Caithness there have been occasional discoveries of interments of this character, but unfortunately no one seems to have thought a burial which was associated with “rusty pieces of old iron” worthy of careful investigation. The Rev. Mr. Pope records, incidentally,[29] a remarkable discovery of swords “in a peat bank near the house of Haimar” in the neighbourhood of Thurso, and dismisses the subject with the remark that “they were odd machines resembling plough-shares, all iron.” A pair of oval bowl-shaped brooches of great beauty were found at Castletown in Caithness in 1786. One of these (Fig. 32) is in the National Museum.[30] It is 4½ inches in length and 3 inches in width. It is double-shelled, and the gilding, both on the under and upper shells, is still visible, although the “double row of silver cord along the edge,” which is noted in the first description of the brooches when they were presented by James Traill of Rattar in 1787, is now gone. The centre of the convexity of the brooch is surmounted by a bold ornament, in form somewhat resembling a crown. The ornamentation is distinctly zoomorphic, the four projecting ornaments below the centrepiece being carved into the form of animals’ heads. These brooches were “dug out of the top of the ruins” of a Broch near Castletown, and were found “lying beside a skeleton, buried under a flat stone with very little earth above it.” This evidently implies that the interment had been made in the upper part of the mound covering the ruins of the Broch.[31] ----- Footnote 29: Pope’s Translation of Torfaeus, Wick, 1866, p. 169. Footnote 30: The other was given to Mr. Worsaae on the occasion of his visit to Scotland, and I had no difficulty in recognising it in one of the cases of the Museum at Copenhagen. Footnote 31: It was the custom of the Northmen to bury their dead in mounds raised in their honour, but they also took advantage of mounds already raised, and of natural or artificial mounds which were convenient for the purpose. See also the remarks on the use of the mounds covering the ruins of Brochs as burial-places in the subsequent Lecture on Brochs. ----- [Illustration: Fig. 33.—Oval Bowl-shaped Brooch, found in a cist in the Longhills, Wick.]