32 The Neiv Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



It has, I am aware, been urged that since the Old-English 

 churches were chiefly built of wood, we are not likely to find 

 any ruins. This may be so. But by no process of reasoning 

 can the absence of a thing prove its former presence, Nor 

 need we pay any attention to the argument drawn from such 

 names as Castle Malwood, The Castle near Burley, Castle Hill 

 on the banks of the Avon, Lucas Castle, and Broomy and 

 Thompson Castles in Ashley Walk. These Castles are of the 

 air mere names, invented, as in other parts of England, by 

 the popular mind. At Castle Malwood there is the simple 

 trench of a camp, and recent excavations there showed no traces 

 of buildings ; whilst the Castle at Burley, and Castle Hill, and 

 the others, were merely earthen fortifications and entrench- 

 ments, made by the Kelts and West- Saxons. Nor must we 

 be led away by the few Forest names ending in ton, the Old- 

 English tun, which, after all, means more often only a few 

 scattered homesteads than even a village, still less a town or 

 city, in the modern sense of the word.* 



* Mr. Thorpe notices, in his edition of The Chronicle, vol. ii. p. 94, foot- 

 note, its early use, in a document of Eadger's, A.D 964, in the sense of a 

 town ; but in the first place it certainly meant only an inclosed spot. There 

 appears to have been at some time, in the south part of the Forest, a church 

 near Wootton, the Odetune of Domesday, where its memory is still preserved 

 in the name of Church Lytton given to a small plot of ground. Kose, in 

 his notes to the Red King, p. 205, suggests that Church Moor and Church 

 Place indicate other places of worship. Church Moor is a very unlikely 

 situation, being a large and deep morass, and could well, from its situation, 

 have been nothing else, and, in all probability, takes its name, in quite 

 modern times, from some person. But Church Place at Sloden, like Church 

 Green in Eyeworth Wood, is certainly merely the embankments near which 

 the Romano- British population employed in the Roman potteries, once 

 lived, and which ignorance and superstition have turned into sacred ground. 

 The word Lytton, at Wootton, however, makes the former position certain, 



