[Illustration: Late-Celtic Pottery from the Glastonbury Lake Village] The art of the ornamental worker in wood in the Late-Celtic period is displayed at its best in the tankards, buckets, and tubs of which, fortunately, a few interesting specimens have been preserved. The tankard from Trawsfynydd,[295] Merionethshire, now in the Liverpool Museum, shows great ingenuity of construction, the staves of which it is composed being kept together at the bottom by a corrugated wire let into the ends of the staves. Another tankard, belonging to Mr. T. Layton,[296] F.S.A., has the staves fastened together with wooden dowels and pins. [295] _Archæologia Cambrensis_, ser. 5, vol. xiii., p. 212. [296] _Archæologia_, vol. lii., p. 359. We have already described how the engraved patterns were produced on the ornamental woodwork from the Glastonbury Marsh Village by a finely pointed instrument, and afterwards burnt in. Ornamental objects were also made out of bone and Kimmeridge shale during the Late-Celtic period, but there is nothing special to call for any comment in the technical methods employed, except to mention that the patterns on the bone objects were often engraved by means of a pair of compasses, and that the vessels of Kimmeridge shale were turned on a lathe. Of the basketry in which the Celts excelled in the time of Cæsar[297] no specimens are now extant, but no doubt their natural talent for decorative art showed itself in this native industry of Britain, as in all others. [297] C. Elton’s _Origins of English History_, p. 122. LEADING CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LATE-CELTIC STYLE OF ART Once the eye of a trained archæologist has become familiar with the general appearance of the art products of the Late-Celtic school, it is comparatively easy for him to recognise other products of the same school almost by intuition; but he would find it a much more difficult task if he were asked to define exactly what the peculiarities are by which he is enabled to distinguish this particular style from any other. Most of the decorative elements composing the style are of so fantastic and original a nature as to impress themselves first on the retina of the eye, and then on the mind; yet, on that very account, they seem to elude the descriptive powers of the writer. The motives employed are neither purely geometrical in character nor have they been obviously arrived at by conventionalising natural forms, but are something between the two, being (like the designs on the ancient British coins) the result of successive copying. We will, however, notwithstanding the difficulties that have been pointed out, endeavour to analyse the decoration of the Late-Celtic period as far as it is possible to do so.