58 The New Forest : its Hlstori/ and its Scenery. 



or, rather, as the fact of the mere shapeless mass would prove, 

 on the older British track. Not only, too, was tin brought here 

 from Cornwall, but also, in later times, lead from the Mendip 

 Hills. Pigs of it have been picked up on a branch of the same 

 Roman road running from Uphill on the Severn to Salisbury, 

 and from thence joining the Leap road. One of them, stamped 

 with the name of Hadrian, is now in the Bath Museum. We 

 are thus enabled to connect Leap with the famous passage 'of 

 the Greek historian. 



Sir George Lewis's theory has, too, been singularly corro- 

 borated in other directions, especially by the large quantities of 

 bronze ornaments found during the excavations in the Swiss 

 Lakes, 1853 and 1854, the metals of which could only have 

 been brought there by an overland route. 



Further, too, we must not reject the account of Diodorus, 

 because he says that at low tide the tin was carried over in 

 carts. We must remember the extremely indefinite views of 

 the ancients on all geographical subjects. The vaguest ideas 

 were held, especially about Britain. Erring in a different 

 direction, the mistake is not so bad as Pliny's, in making the 

 Island six days' sail from England. There seems, however, a 

 most natural explanation, that Diodorus, not having been there, 

 took for granted the wild traditions and rumours which reached 

 him, and which, even in these days, with only the slightest 

 possible variation of form, still hold their ground with the 

 Forest peasantry, in the legend that the stone of which Beau- 

 lieu Abbey is built was brought over the dry bed of the Solent, 

 in carts, from the Binstead Quarries. 



Still the passage is not without the further difficulty, that 

 Diodorus seems, from the context, to have supposed that the 

 Island was situated close to where the tin was dug. This, again, 



58 



