The largest vessel of this description which has been recorded is one which was presented to the museum in fragments in 1834. It was dug out of a mound called Wilkie’s Knowe, in the island of Westray, in Orkney, and an account of its discovery, which has not been preserved, was read to the Society in April 1835. The form of the vessel is oval, narrowing from the brim downwards. The circumference of the upper part is about 6 feet, and the thickness of the sides of the vessel 1½ inches. The material is the same chloritic or steatitic stone of which the others are formed. These examples will suffice to show the general characteristics of this peculiar class of interments. They are interments of bodies usually burnt, but sometimes unburnt; usually placed in cisted mounds, sometimes singly, at other times in groups; and generally unaccompanied by any manufactured article except the urns. The character of the urns is peculiar. They are not of clay, but of stone. They are not circular, but oval or irregularly four-sided in shape. They vary extremely in size, the largest known being 6 feet in circumference, and the smallest less than 5 inches long and 3 inches high. They are characterised by extreme simplicity of form and decoration. When they are ornamented the decoration is confined to the scoring of two or more lines underneath the rim, and rudely parallel to it. Their range, so far as is at present known, is confined to Caithness, Orkney, and Shetland, the area proper of the old Norwegian Earldom of Orkney. Urns of steatitic stone are of common occurrence in the burial mounds of the Viking time in Norway.[47] But they are rarely placed in cists of stones, and they are usually accompanied by such deposits of arms, implements, and ornaments, as have been described in the previous Lecture. This form of burial, which is found in the area of the Norwegian colonisation of the north of Scotland, is not completely comparable to the common form in Norway. But it presents as its characteristic feature the single point in which Norwegian burials of that period differ from all others. Nowhere else in Europe are urns of steatite the characteristic feature of any class of burials. In this respect, therefore, these northern interments in Scotland link themselves with interments of the Viking time in Norway. But they are so far differentiated from the common Norwegian type as to constitute a distinct variety of that type peculiar to the area proper of the Norwegian colony which founded the earldom of Orkney in the time of the Scandinavian Paganism. ----- Footnote 47: