102 PAPERS, ETC. 
Hoare. The conquests it was intended to include seems 
to have been—first, the Vale of Pewsey ; secondly, the 
mineral district of the Mendip Hills ; and thirdly, the 
country lying between this range and the marshes of the 
Parret.’ Ptolemy gives Winchester, Bath and llIchester, 
as the three prineipal towns of the Belgie province. But 
Bath was not included in the line of the Wansdyke; it 
lies just without it, and therefore is not properly a Belgie 
town ; although the Belgie fortress on Hampton Down, 
which I shall proceed to deseribe, is on the Wansdyke, 
and lies immediately above the present eity and the hot 
springs. This may have led the geographers into the mis- 
take. “If,” says Dr. Guest, “we run a line along the 
Wansdyke from Berkshire to the Channel, then along the 
coast to the Parret, then up that river eastward till we 
strike the southern borders of Wiltshire, and then follow 
across Dorsetshire to the sea, we shall have defined with 
tolerable accuracy the northern and western boundaries 
which Roman geographers assigned to the Belg& proper.” 
In the description which Collinson has given of the 
Wansdyke, he seems to have fallen into the error of mis- 
taking for it a portion of one of the older Belgie boundary- 
lines. When he wrote his history, earth-works had not 
received that careful attention which they have since had, 
and if both he and Sir R. C. Hoare have spoken somewhat 
inaccurately, and sometimes made mistakes in not diseri- 
minating between roads and boundary-lines, or confused 
lines of a different date, we must only be very thankful 
that their researches in days past have opened a path for 
others to enter upon their investigations and carry their 
labours to a more certain issue. Dr. Guest observes that 
our ancient boundary-lines seem to admit of a three-fold 
division : there are—first, the boundary-lines which defined 
