There is also this remarkable circumstance attaching to the bronze swords, viz., that there is no well-authenticated instance[1004] of their occurrence with any interments in barrows. It is true that Professor Daniel Wilson[1005] speaks of the frequent discovery of broken swords with sepulchral deposits, and mentions one found alongside of a cinerary urn in a tumulus at Memsie, Aberdeenshire, and another which lay beside a human skeleton in a cist under Carlochan Cairn, Carmichael, Galloway. But one of these discoveries took place so long ago as 1776, and in both cases there may, as Canon Greenwell has suggested, either have been some mistake as to the manner of finding, or the connection of the sword with the interment may have been apparent rather than real. A portion of a sword 6½ inches long, said to have been found in a cairn at Ballagan,[1006] Strathblane, Stirlingshire, in 1788, is in the Antiquarian Museum at Edinburgh. A “sarcophagus with ashes” is said to have been in the cairn. Another sword, broken in four pieces, is said to have been found in a barrow in Breconshire.[1007] Another, found at Wetheringsett, Suffolk, is said to have lain fourteen feet deep in clay, with a great number of human bones, but no pottery or other remains. In this case, however, there is no mention of a barrow. The sword is elsewhere said to have been found in a sandpit.[1008] In Scandinavia, however, bronze swords have not unfrequently been found with interments in barrows; and inasmuch as the owners of the bronze swords in Britain were, after death, in all probability interred, either in a burnt or unburnt condition, there appears no reason why in some instances their swords may not have been buried with them, though as yet the evidence of these weapons having been found in tumuli, is far from satisfactory. Possibly at the time when the swords were in use the practice of erecting mounds over graves had ceased, and there are now no external marks upon the ground to indicate the graves of the warriors who wielded the bronze swords, and who have thus escaped disturbance in their “narrow cells” from the hands of treasure-seekers and archæologists; or possibly the custom of burying weapons with the dead may at that time have ceased.