DEVON LANES AND THEIR ASSOCIATIONS. 3 



Violent rains cut deep furrows in the road ; during winter the 

 path became a water-course where it was not a bog, and this 

 continued fot centuries. Then came an age of improvement ; 

 the adjoining moor was divided from the road, after the native 

 fashion, by banks of earth, trees and bushes took possession of 

 them ; and while every season washes the road away, every 

 time the farmer mends his fences the banks above gain height. 

 Thus each year deepens the lane. Frost often brings down 

 one of these banks, which are topped by hedges, in some cases 

 thirty feet above the traveller's head ; and this " rougement," as 

 they call it in Devon, must be replaced before the lane is 

 passable, so that their depth seldom diminishes, and perpetually 

 increases. 



Many of these lanes are extremely ancient. Round Dart- 

 moor especially they go back to Celtic times, or beyond them 

 to that dim pre-historic antiquity, where even archaeology loses 

 itself. Their natural formation, as we have described it above, 

 overthrows a theory which has before now found favour with 

 ethnologists, and which would contrast the generous, open- 

 hearted Roman with the skulking Celt. The Roman shows 

 his character according to this fancy by his wide, elevated streets, 

 driven for the most part in a straight line through the length 

 and breadth of the land ; while the other's nature was to hide 

 in circuitous hollow lanes, righting in trenches, as it were, while 

 the legions manoeuvred in the open. What little the ancients 

 have told us of the Celts negatives this view. Though superior 

 force and a higher civilization drove the ancient Briton to the 

 fastnesses of Wales and Cornwall, the Celt was brave to rash- 

 ness, ready, as Aristotle says, "to dare even the waves with 

 his sword." 



Returning to the lanes, another feature which strikes the 

 stranger, besides their twistings up and down the hill-sides and 

 their depth, is their narrowness. It is very difficult, and in 

 many cases impossible, for one vehicle to pass another in them. 



