By William Long, Esq. 227 



acquisitions, over Dorsetshire, Wiltshire, and Hampshire. All these 

 seven valla describe the most desultory track, but proceed in windings 

 nearly parallel— a proof of their reference to each other, and that 

 the aborig-inal Britons did not suffer the invaders to advance with 

 any degree of precipitation. 



" The most perfect is that near Woodyates, in Dorsetshire : and 

 which originating, as I presume, from the river Stour, or the sea- 

 shore, about Christehurchj in Hampshire, appears conspicuous, like 

 the elliptic on one of the hemispheres of a globe, over the long and 

 broad declivity of Bladon Hill, above Marton, in Wiltshire, and in- 

 tei'secting, with a prodigious ridge and foss in almost original pre- 

 servation, the Roman road called the Ikenild Street, within a furlong 

 of Woodyates, pushes through the woody tracts of Cranbourne Chase, 

 and seems to terminate at Grovely Wood, within five miles of 

 Salisbury. This very remarkable rampart is unquestionably Celtic, 

 being evidently antecedent to the Romans ; for at the intersection 

 above-mentioned, the substance of the Ikenild, that most dubious and 

 unintelligible of the Pretorian ways, yet here retaining the genuine 

 and massy remains of a pebbly and flinty stratum cemented with 

 chalk, is continued in a line across or through it, as was plainly per- 

 ceptible when the London turnpike-road was lately made. Had the 

 rampart and dyke been posterior, the Roman materials would have 

 been torn up and destroyed. And I must add that near Woodyates 

 Lane the Roman road penetrates the centre of a barrow, one of a 

 numerous group. These barrows, apparently connected with the 

 rampart, are as indisputably Celtic, and not Roman ; because the 

 Romans, more pious than modern Christians, would not have suffered 

 such a profanation to have been committed on a sepulchre of their 

 ancestors. Nor, in after times, would the Saxons or Danes have 

 formed a barrow on a public way. Wansdyke or Gwhahan-Dyke, 

 the ditch of division, which also interferes with a probable Roman 

 road at Hedington, and in the midst of which is situated the town 

 of Devizes, anciently a Celtic station, is the last frontier of the en- 

 croachments of the Belgre northward. Here a stand was made 

 between the contending barbarians : and as Wansdyke runs between 

 Stonehenge and Abury, probably those two mysterious monuments, 



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