Q74 Selwood Forest. 
demolished, and the inhabitants of the street which connects the 
two to have forsaken, or to have been driven away from, their homes, 
or, perhaps, to have removed the materials, to build the New Town 
on another site, and that all the vaults and cellars of the Old Town 
had been left; gaping holes in the ground, never filled up and 
levelled ; the general appearance of the Old Town, after the lapse 
of sixteen hundred years would have been not much unlike the old 
hill fortress of Penselwood, the smaller fortress at the foot of the 
hill, and the Pen Pits between them. 
But it is impossible in a short paper to discuss this question fully. 
Those who may take an interest in it should read with care Mr. 
Kerslake’s publications, as well as those that are adverse to his 
views.! 
The choice, as to what the Pen Pits really were, seems to be 
this. They were either quarries or the sites of ancient habitation. 
The former appears to myself untenable: and Mr. Kerslake’s view 
more likely to be the true one. 
I have dwelt upon this part of my subject perhaps rather too 
long, but it is really the only thing I have to say about Selwood in 
the very darkest period. 
We must now leave this obscure atmosphere, and pass to another 
not quite so dark, but still dark enough. You must skip overa 
trifle of a few hundred years, during which the name of Selwood is 
never met with. What is the reason of these long silent blanks? 
We have no local information because either nobody took the trouble 
to write it, or, if they did, it has perished. The most likely persons 
to write it were, of course, the monks in the monasteries. But we 
have a curious bit of testimony from one of them, who had a turn 
for history and topography, that though he desired to write he was 
stopped by his Superior. This would-be writer’s name was Richard 
of Cirencester. About 1350 he was a monk in the great abbey 
1 Mr. Kerslake’s views are contained in three pamphlets :—“ A Primeval 
British Metropolis,” 1877; “Caer Pensauel coit, a long lost un-Romanised 
British Metropolis, a Re-assertion, with a Map,” 1882; “The Liberty of inde- 
pendent Historical Research,” 1885. The adverse opinion is to be found in 
two reports in Somersetshire Archeological Society’s Proceedings, and one by 
Lt.-Gen. Pitt-Rivers, F.R.S. ; 
