its upper surface, and the inner edges of the loops are sharpened so that they could be driven into the wood of the hub. The iron tyre of the wheel is 3⁄8 of an inch thick and 1¾ inches in breadth. Specimens of the hub-rims and linings are illustrated in Plate LXX. Fig. 5, which belongs to the former class, is from Pit XVI. Linings are represented by Fig. 9, from the same pit, and by Fig. 10, from the ditch of the early fort.
The only wheel of a similar character hitherto known in Scotland came from the fort at Bar Hill. Slightly smaller in size, it shows the same features of construction-the long hub, the comparatively slender spokes and the felloe composed of a single piece of bent ash. Messrs. Macdonald and Park, in their account of Bar Hill, have pointed out the resemblance between this wheel and the nave and spokes found in the pre-Roman Lake-village of Glastonbury, referring at the same time to the ten-spoked wheel discovered in the year 1882 at La Tène, in which also the felloe was formed of a single piece of ash, bent.[1] At the same time they indicated the possibility that the Bar Hill wheel is a product of native workmanship. That this is so is more than probable, though the exact nature of the vehicles to which such wheels belonged and the seat of their manufacture are alike unknown to us.
The discoveries at La Tène and at Glastonbury, both sites which are pre-Roman, only bear out the evidence we have from early writers to the effect that before the Romans reached Central Europe and Britain, the natives were possessed of wheeled vehicles, and of vehicles which, like the war chariots—the covinnus and the essedum—were capable of being driven rapidly. Indeed, the vocabulary used by Roman writers in speaking of the wheeled transport of the Empire is largely Celtic in its origin. Such words as benna, carpentum, carrus, cisium, colisatum, covinnus, essedum, petorritum, reda, which are applied to a considerable variety of vehicles—carts, waggons, war-chariots and light cars for rapid movement—can all be traced to a Celtic origin.[2] It is no doubt tempting to see in these wheels the remains of some Caledonian chariot captured before the walls. But, however much the suggestion may appeal to our imagination, we have no means of proving it. We shall probably do well to rest content with the view that they belonged to more prosaic vehicles. We have no strictly British or Gaulish representation of chariots, but we possess a series of reliefs on grave-monuments from Igel and Neumagen on the
1 The Roman Fort, on the Bar Hill p. 94.
2 See Holder, Alt-keltischer Sprachschatz, Leipzig, 1897. I am indebted to Professor J. B. Keune of Metz for drawing my attention to this subject.
293