53 



sometimes they made new camps of their own. The rapid fall 

 of the hill-land towards the West formed a natural defence 

 which these masters of the military art were not slow to make 

 use of 



We find camps on Leckhampton and Crickley Hills and at 

 Birdlip, on Coopers Hill and beyond Birdlip at Kimsbury. While 

 to the North of Leckhampton we find camps at Dowdeswell, 

 Hewlett's Hill, Cleeve Hill and Nottingham Hill. 



The Crickley Hill camp is a British Camp with a very ingeni- 

 ous Roman entrance. The Dowdeswell camp is an original 

 Roman camp. Some of these Roman camps formed connective 

 links in a very long chain. We have been made familiar lately 

 with the system of blockhouses brought into operation for the 

 purpose of keeping in check an agile enemy. Such a system 

 was put into use in Britain in A.D. 50. Tacitus tells us that 

 the Roman] general made a string of forts from the Severn to 

 the Wash. Mr. Witts has been over much of the line and has 

 identified several score of such forts along a line from near 

 Bristol through Cheltenham and away towards Lincolnshire. 

 Some of our Cheltenham forts are therefore no mere isolated 

 outposts, but form part of an immense line of fortification made 

 for the purpose of protecting the Roman portion of Britain 

 which lay in the South and South-East of our Island. The 

 barbarians, pushed steadily to the West and North, were kept 

 from raiding the colonised territory by the blockhouse system, 

 which Lord Kitchener has copied with such success against an 

 even more mobile enemy than the agile Celt. 



Besides the villas and camps, the Romans also have left 

 traces of their period of occupation in their roads. These were 

 in some cases British trackways converted in later years by the 

 new masters of the country into finer and more permanent lines 

 of traffic. The Gloucester and Birdlip Road was such a British 

 road improved and paved by the Romans. At the top of the 

 Cotteswolds near Birdlip it is defended by a bank, its ultimate 

 destination was possibly St. David's in Pembrokeshire. 



Another British trackway ran from Gloucester to Tewkesbury 

 via Deerhurst, while the Roman road ran near the present road 

 to the. West of it. 



There are other ancient trackways connecting the hill forts 

 with one another to be seen on the Cotteswolds. 



