“On Aingsbury and other Camps in Aorth 
EAultshive.”” 
By the Rev. W. H. E. Mc. Knieur. 
To the Editor of the Wiltshire Magazine. 
Dear Sir, 
You ask me to give you my ideas as to Ringsbury Camp and similar 
earthworks that crown the highest points of our downs. I do not know that I 
can give you any matter that will be new to your Association, or worthy of their 
consideration. I may, perhaps, put together my thoughts which will provoke 
discussion, and that is perhaps the chief object of such a paper, on a subject that 
must have been well thrashed-out by your Association. 
It had frequently occurred to me, as I rode over the downs past Barbury 
Castle, that the common idea of that, and the many similar earthworks along 
the down-ridge, as well as in the plain below, being military positions or 
‘camps’ was not consistent with the real condition of things at the time when 
they must have been thrown up. That they were thrown up long anterior to the 
Roman invasion of the island is admitted, and though often mis-called ‘‘ Roman 
Camps,” they were—by their irregular construction—such as no Roman engineer 
would have made, and though some of them might have been occupied by the 
Romans on an occasion, or as a temporary position of conquest, they were never 
the works of Roman soldiers, or used by them as permanent military positions. 
The Romans found them and left them in their original use, as the secure 
dwelling-places of different tribes or families, and as soon as the British tribes 
acquiesced in the Roman rule, these “camps” were left in the undisturbed 
occupation of their original holders, and so continued during the whole four 
hundred years of Roman rule, until the next great invasion of our shores by the 
northern tribes from the Baltic coast, when they were found still occupied, and 
used by the British. This I think I shall prove by the almost only proof that 
is left us from times of unwritten records, namely by the use of “ names.” 
But first I must glance at the probable condition of a people, such as our 
forefathers must have been in that most distant age when they built Abury. 
For I hold that our forefathers clustered round that great religious centre, and, 
as'they must have been there in numbers before they built their temple, their 
dwelling-place and i¢ (their temple) may very reasonably be regarded as coeval. 
We find the foss and mound at Abury, as well as in their dwelling-places, and 
that was the limit of their powers of construction. Then their temple shows 
that that object, upon which their best skill and devotion would be expended, 
could command nothing more than the arrangement of undressed stones in 
circular order—erected on end (the very first effort at construction), and the 
expenditure of a mation’s strength to fulfil its instinct of devotion. If their 
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