20 
chalk beneath, and gradually the silt, mud, and lastly the peat, brought 
the face of the valley to its present quiet contour ; and now the con- 
tracted river, supplied by a less rainfall, and a diminished valley-slope, 
flowed on without any great periodical change in volume or velocity. 
USES. 
From the time that the ancient Celtic people pastured their 
herds upon the Downs to the present hour, the Sarsen stones had been 
appropriated to very various uses. Spread broadcast over the face of 
hill and dale, and easily accessible, and other building materials not 
being immediately at hand, what more natural than that the primitive 
Briton should have selected those fashioned by Nature to suit his pur- 
poses, and with them built his temples, cromlechs, and memorial 
stones. It was found therefore that he availed himself of some of the 
most gigantic specimens for the erection of two out of the four 
circles of Stonehenge, and the whole of Abury, together with its 
mystic serpentine avenues, which were stated by Stukely to have con- 
sisted, inclusive of the circles of the temple, of 600 of these Sarsen 
masses, their individual weight probably averaging from 60 to Ioo tons. 
Similar stones, not half a century ago, surrounded many of the 
Wiltshire barrows ; but most of them had been since used up for 
road repairing, or for building purposes. | One remarkable relic of 
ancient times was a holed Sarsen, standing under a tree by the road- 
side at Kingston Lisle, near the famous hill of the White Horse. It 
had long given the name of the “Blowing stone” to a wayside 
hostelry. The noise emitted by blowing into the upper part of the 
stone was so terrific, that if uttered in the silence of the night it must 
have effectually awakened the Saxon slumberers in the vale below. 
Some of the Romanized Britons used these stones to build, by 
simple impaction, their villages on the Downs ; one of which stood 
near Russley, a lonely spot not far from the old Ridgeway, a British 
trackway from time immemorial used by the Welsh drovers, with their 
cattle travelling out of the West of England. And yet again, the 
materials used by the Roman Britons had been carted away to con- 
struct the modern village of Baydon. Walls, barns, piggeries, 
cottages, mansions, churches, all had received a taste of the Sarsens 
_of the Tertiary Basin. These massive blocks, therefore, consolidated 
in a sea-bed thousands of years before man’s advent, and left stranded 
