X.—On a Bronze Age Cemetery and other antiquities at Largs, Ayrshire

Extract

A portion of the town of Largs is built on a raised beach which here attains a breadth of nearly a mile, though in general it is a mere strip of flat land along the coast. This low ground is fertile, and beyond it rises a picturesque background of grassy hills which shelter the town and bay on the east, a combination of natural advantages which must have rendered the locality an attractive place of abode for man from the earliest times. A plot of cultivated land, near the termination of Nelson Street which intersects the raised beach, was acquired by a townsman as the site of a small villa. The area selected was slightly more elevated than the vacant ground on the east side, but its relative height with respect to its western boundary was uncertain, owing to the land there having been already built upon. It would, however, be no exaggeration to describe it as a low gravelly mound. While digging the foundations of the proposed villa nothing of an archaeological character attracted attention, but later on, in course of some outside operations close to the south wall of the newly erected building, the workmen came upon a small cinerary urn containing calcined bones. The vessel was shaped like a modern flower-pot, without any ornamentation, and stood mouth upwards, having, apparently, been simply deposited in a hole in the gravel. It appears to have been extracted in fragments, and dispersed among private collectors.