268 Cherhill Gleanings. 
mind. Before, however, taking any step in the matter I thought 
that I would ask a very old man who was then living in the parish 
whether he had ever heard of any researches having been made 
previously on the same site. So putting him one day in my pony 
carriage I drove him up the road and showed him the depressions. 
His face lighted up at once, and he told me that he had never 
heard of anybody making searches there, but that he did mind that 
“it was from them pits that they digged out the vlints when they 
was a-building some farm-house or other (I forget which) when he 
were a buoy!” So my theory of British habitations, and subsequent 
paper and resultant udos, all vanished together. And then my old 
friend went on to point out the line of the ancient road, just below the 
pits in question, which was only replaced by the new one at the be- 
ginning of the present century. He had often driven the plough, 
he told me, in his earlier days, on the site of the very road over 
which we were then passing. The line of the older road may be 
still seen very clearly, diverging from the modern one about a 
hundred yards above the last house in Cherhill village, and coming 
into it again at a place called “ Needle-point,” just at the top of 
Beckhampton Field. This old road, I may add, possesses itself a not 
inconsiderable amount of interest, there being much ground for 
believing (as Mr. Smith points out in his “ Antiquities of North 
Wilts”) that it follows the course of an old British trackway, and 
that the banks which for some distance run along its sides were 
intended for the purposes of fortification. 
One more reminiscence—scarcely as yet, perhaps, historical, but 
destined soon to be so, and as such worthy, I think, of record in 
these humble annals. And that is of the big bonfire which was 
made on the Jubilee Day last year upon the highest point of 
Oldborough Hill, just above our village. 
For the two days immediately preceding the 21st of June many 
waggons had been busy in carting up to the top of the hill loads of 
faggots, stakes, and shavings, to the mass of which I believe that 
every cottager in the village, with one solitary exception, contributed. 
With these a pyre about 26ft. in diameter at base, and standing 
$5ft high was constructed in the shape of a hollow cone, with four 
