By Maud E. Cimnington. 425 



silt up to the dark seam is quite clearly the result of weathering 

 from the slope of the rampart and from the sides of the ditch itself. 

 Until the rampart had hecome covered with turf, and while the 

 ditch continued to expose bare chalk sides to the weather, this 

 silting process would necessarily be rapid, but when once this 

 process had so far come to an end as to allow the top of the silt 

 in the ditch to grow a thick turf line, the silting into the ditch 

 must have been very slow and very slight. "Why should it have 

 begun again suddenly, and where could the material have come 

 from ? On one side the ditch is bounded by the rampart, which is 

 composed entirely of large lumps of chalk, quite unlike the fine 

 gravelly rubble in the upper portion of the ditch ; on the outer 

 side the land slopes gently away /ro?», not ^oii^art^s, the ditch, so 

 that the tendency to silt in from that side must always have been 

 very slight. 



In the uppermost mixed and earthy silting in all the other ditch 

 sections there were numbers of snail shells dispersed through it. 

 In this eastern ditch the distinct dark seam was indeed full of 

 snail shells, but in the rubble above, until the surface turf was 

 reached, there were none. If this rubble had accumulated slowly, 

 like that of the silt of the other ditches, why are there no snail 

 shells in it as there are in them ? , 



Roman remains, and nothing of a later date, were found 

 throughout this rubble, and nothing Eoman was found below the 

 dark seam. The explorei's of Worlbury, that great pre-Eoman 

 stronghold on the Bristol Channel, came to the conclusion that 

 the bulwarks there had been overthrown, and the ditches as far 

 as possible filled up after the place was taken by assault by the 

 lomans. May not in some degree a similar fate have overtaken 

 this Wiltshire stronghold ? This eastern side is the weak one 

 3f the camp, and if the defences on this side were destroyed the 

 rest would be of no avail. Perhaps this is why the ditches on the 

 )ther sides show only natural silting-in. 



A less romantic but on the whole much more probable reason 

 for the filling in of the ditch is that a large open ditch such as 

 [this, even in its partly silted-up state, would have been a constant 



