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that had not succumbed to the biting frosts, and though the dog violet and even 
the bilberry were stunted, and the cowslips of the pass frost-bitten, the mountain 
pansy (viola lutea) with its bright yellow enlivened the hill-turf, and supplied an 
extempore bouquet for button-holes not strictly botanical. The chief interest of 
the day, however, was divided between the archeologists and the botanists. The 
former climbed a height of no small stiffness to inspect and interview a claimant to 
the honours of Caractacus’s last battle, but this craze, so catching among us 
borderers who have any sort of British earthwork within a few miles of us, was 
kept under due control on this particular May morning. 
It may be at once stated that Caer Caradoc, near Church Stretton, is a rude 
specimen of a British entrenchment, for the most part natural, but with so much 
of human handiwork as consisted in trenching across the ridge, below the peak 
connecting the crags, and the precipitous sides of the hill, and making a hollow on 
the other side of the peak. Neither in defensibility nor in natural water supply, 
were there the requisites for a strongly tenable position, and as to the faintest 
identity with the heights depicted by Tacitus—the amnis vado incesto, the juga 
imminentia and the heights above for the Britons to flee to—well! the Breidden 
near Welshpool have no rival in Caer Caradoc! Our geologists—a mere knot on 
this occasion—were content to refresh their interest in their favourite pursuit by a 
general survey rather than by special fossil-hunting. Whilst the visitor unattached 
peered through the haze at the Wrekin and Stiperstones, and had to content 
himself with the clear home view beneath him and immediately around him, the 
“ stone-breakers” realised Mr. Symond’s description of the “ tremendous fault” 
looking westward from Caradoc, and “the proofs that considerable earthquake 
movements have affected the whole country since the deposition of the Upper 
Silurians.” 
Declining to investigate a limestone quarry—offering abundant specimens of 
Pentamerus Knightii—they descended the sheer hill-side to the north-west, crossed 
over the valley, and, with the exception of a detachment bent on re-visiting the 
slopes of the Longmynd, made their way back to Church Stretton. Here, while 
dinner was preparing, Mr. Wilson, the Rector, conducted them over his interesting 
church, and as for the dinner—I know not how it was—it sped so pleasantly that 
intending readers of papers had no other course than to pocket them, when, dictum 
factum, the President had almost in one breath to say grace after meal, propose 
the Queen’s health, and give the word for the station. By favour of the belated 
railway train, indeed, we were able to convert the platform into an open-air 
chamber of science, and here, in the space of 20 minutes, the late Mr. Flavell 
Edmunds (upon whose presence with us at all our meetings a-field in the last year 
of his laborious and scantily recreated life I look back with peculiar pleasure), 
discoursed to us on the effects upon vegetation of the abnormal May frosts ; and I 
myself found time to exhibit and tell the tale of a bit of Deerfold pottery, which 
proves the former civilisation of that terra semi-cognita. 
It was a far finer day when, on the 19th of June, the Club set forth for 
Builth. Radnorshire never fails to prove attractive to Woolhopians, and I trust 
