6 
of Somerset, vol. iii., p. 599. Collinson in describing it says, 
“The vast rocky encampment of Dolebury rises on the 
north, and forms a romantic outline,” but he does not 
mention a very fine Barrow which is beyond the Church at 
Rowberrow, farther south towards Shipham, and may have been 
a burial place to the Camp, or the monument of some ancient 
British Chief. Mr. Clark justly remarks that “on the great 
ranges (of hills), as Mendip, Cotteswold, and the Chilterns, and 
the hills on the Welsh border, the Camps are almost all of a 
large area, containing twenty to even sixty acres. Worle contains 
18 acres . . . . Hamden Hill Camp in Somerset is 3 miles in girth, 
Cadbury covers 25 acres; Roborough (by which he means 
Dolebury) is of immense size and strength. It is evident that 
almost all these Camps were intended to accommodate a whole 
tribe, whose hunting grounds lay in the wooded plain below, and 
looking to the immense labour bestowed upon them, and to the 
quantity of black mould within them, they must have been 
intended for permsnent residences, and so occupied, possibly for 
centuries.” I have little doubt that this is true of Dolebury; 
although there is no spring of water within the Camp, yet at the 
foot of it, below Rowberrow, there is a streamlet by which water 
would be supplied, whenever the stock of rain-water, usually 
stored in reservoirs lined with clay, within the Camp, should fail. 
From this brook at the bottom of the valley there is a winding 
road up the hill side, which is protected in part of its course by 
earthen mounds. 
Mr. Clark observes that by far the greater number of British 
Camps were thrown up at a remote period. There are other 
camps that crown the Mendip Hills, but none so large or perfect 
as Dolebury. There is a camp over Burrington village, com- 
manding the pass up the Combe into the Mendip, and this is 
fortified by a single rampart and ditch, the rampart being of 
loose stones and the form nearly square. - At one point the 
rampart is left unfinished. It has more the appearance of a 
