232 Summer Studies of Birds and Books CHAP. 



it will perhaps occur to the reader that Bindon must 

 offer a splendid position to an enemy landing on the 

 coast, or to a tribe driven from the interior and 

 clinging to the last available defence. The low-lying 

 land that he shuts in would supply both food and 

 water : sheep could pasture on his summit ; and the 

 exceeding steepness of his sides would make it im- 

 possible, without artillery, to carry the hill in the face 

 of a sufficient number of defenders. And that Bindon 

 has at one time been put to some such use as this 

 there is very clear evidence to be found. At the top 

 of the steepest part of the entire length of his land- 

 ward front there runs a well-marked double line of 

 fortification ; not indeed such huge trenches and 

 ramparts as once made an impregnable fortress of 

 Maiden Castle near Dorchester, or even such as 

 guarded Eing Hill, Bindon's nearest neighbour to the 

 eastward, but a line which was once, no doubt, quite 

 sufficient for its purpose, touching the precipitous 

 cliffs at each extremity of the hill, and strengthened 

 at the western end, where the slope is rather less 

 steep than elsewhere, by an inner line of defence 

 much stronger than the outer one. 



What people made these fortifications, in what age, 

 and with what object? I have hunted in massive 

 books of antiquities for answers to these questions, but 

 their splendid quarto pages speak, as usual, with a most 

 uncertain sound. How, indeed, should any one have 



