54 
pike road from Ross to Monmouth bounds it on the north-west, until, having 
crossed the neck of land uniting the Dowards to the Welsh Newton hills, the road 
trends downwards on a sharp declivity towards Monmouth. At the nearest point 
to the river Wye, we leave the high road by a side road taking us to the private 
gas works belonging to Wyaston Leys. Here we touch the Wye, and turning up 
stream, walk that most beautiful of Herefordshire walks, through the gorge 
which divides the Doward hills from those of Stanton, and the range culminating 
in Symonds Yat; until after about three-and-a-half miles we arrive at the upper 
or Horse-ferry. At this spot, which goes by the name of ‘‘ The Washings,” our 
boundary leaves the river, and runs along the ferry road, due north till it joins the 
spot where we set out, in the village of Whitchurch. 
Now we have beaten the bounds, let us look at the character of the the space 
contained within them. They comprise about 2,500 acres of singularly varied 
surface. A narrow rin of cultivated ground fringes the north-west; south and 
east, a still narrower rim of alluvial meadow, disappearing altogether in many 
places, runs along the river. The kernel of this thin shell is a mass of hill, with a 
thin soil resting for four-fifths of its area upon mountain limestone, forming two 
heads with a slight depression between them, which are called, respectively, the 
Greater and the Lesser Dowards, from the fact that the area of the Greater is be- 
tween two and two-and-a-half times that of the Lesser. But the Lesser isthe higher, 
rising to the height of-about 450 feet above the river bed, and crowned on the sum- 
mit by the large and well-known British camp, at the highest point of the northern 
circuit of which it bears the unique iron cage (40ft. high) erected by the late Mr. 
Blakemore as an observatory, but never finished. The whole of the Lesser 
Doward Hill is comprised in the Wyaston Leys estate, and has been converted 
into a deer park by the family of the present owner, M. Bannerman, Esq., and is 
strictly preserved. It used to be the richest of the two in botany, but the effect of 
its conversion into a deer park seems to have been completely to destroy all the 
rarer plants with one notable exception, Atropa Belladonna, of which care and 
handsome but ill-famed plant, the steep limestone slopes of the Lesser Doward are 
in some seasons, a teeming thicket. 
Turning now to the Greater Doward, we find its north and north-east faces 
taken possession of by human beings, who in times not long past have, like a 
swarm of bees seeking where to go, settled here, in cots, hovels, and houses, vary- 
ing from indifferently good to indescribably bad. They are dotted about without 
order or reason, separated by small fields of no shape or size, and united by lanes 
leading in every direction. It is nearly impossible to find your way; but neither 
can you lose it for more than a few minutes; for in whatever direction you wish to 
go, a small lane of perhaps three feet broad opens before you. The character of 
this population was not, in times past, the most civilised. It is the same which 
has formed many other of the more recent Herefordshire hamlets, and it has 
stamped its recollection at many places, as, for example, at Sellack, where the 
hill-side settled in the same way was still, a few years ago, called ‘‘ Lawless Hill.” 
Let us hope this is, or soon will be, a thing of the past. At present many of the 
Doward settlements are uninhabited, the little enclosures untilled, and the whole 
