English: Greisen (altered granite or pegmatite) mould for casting a ribbed socketed bronze axe, with four rib ends on the blade face, suggesting that the axe produced in it would be of southern ribbed type from the Ewart Park phase, c.1000-800 BC.

This is one part of a two part mould, and this half of the mould is broken, so that the upper part, which would have shaped the mouth and side-loop of the axe, is now missing.

There is a narrow hollowed out route from one corner of the blade to the edge of the mould to act as an air vent. The vent would have allowed air to escape, rather than causing an air bubble to be trapped at the narrow edge of the blade, and encouraged the molten metal to run in to the full extent of the defined area.

Just below the edge of the blade there is a small circular depression with a fragment of copper alloy still embedded in the stone mould. "The small piece of copper alloy could be a wire peg for registering the two halves of the mould. I also note that the matrix for the cutting edge looks a little asymmetric; perhaps a worn axe had been used as a pattern" (Dr. Peter Northover, pers comm).

On the outside of the mould, there is part of what looks like a looped handle, which may have been used to lift up this half of the mould off the other half, or perhaps to help to bind them together, when the molten metal was poured in.

There are bronze moulds with strap handles on the back, so this stone mould seems to be imitating those examples, but it may not mean that the handle was necessarily functional in the casting process (Dr. Stuart Needham, pers comm).

Rohl & Needham (1998) illustrate the sort of southern ribbed socketed axe that the mould would have produced on page 136, Fig.38, No.335, which is dated to the Ewart Park phase.