124 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



Fort, and so into the heart of the fertile country round Taunton. 

 Barrows or cemeteries may have been occasionaly found in 

 such situations, but it is impossible to doubt that these hill-tops, 

 succeeding one another from the shore inland, each with its 

 crown of fir-trees, were military posts. Indeed, on some of them 

 (as at Woodbury and Hembury) the line of the Roman vallum 

 may yet be traced. In one of his " Prose Idylls " Canon 

 Kingsley supposes, somewhat fancifully, the character of the 

 treacherous, shrinking, tortuous Kelts to be expressed in the 

 deep winding lanes which so greatly abound in the West of 

 England. These were probably after all inherited by the 

 Aryan immigrants from the aborigines whom they dispossessed, 

 and it may be exterminated, tribes which used flint arrowheads, 

 and secluded themselves in caves and thickets from nature's 

 inclemency and the now extinct monsters of their time.* The 

 chief fault of the Kelts was not cowardice but rather fickleness, 

 instability of will and counsel. Other strong camps are found 

 further westward, guarding the narrow gorge of the Teign, 

 which Mr. Merivale regards as the scene of the final combat 

 between Roman and Damnonian ; while on the open side of 

 Hamilton Down on Dartmoor is the old British village of 

 Grimspound. This with its low enclosure, where assailants 

 must at once have come to close quarters with its defenders, is 

 enough of itself to vindicate the Keltic character for courage. 



When we search yet deeper into the ethnology of the exten- 

 sive view now spread before us, one stratum below the Kelts 

 we reach that primitive people whose remains are found from 

 Caithness to the English Channel associated with rude stone 

 weapons and the bones of the cave bear and woolly rhinoceros; 

 men who rose successively, according to modern archaeology, 

 through the various grades of civilisation represented by beau- 

 tifully polished flint and jade weapons, to the knowledge of the 



* See Professor Lightfoot, Excursus on the "Galatian People," pp. 14 and 

 235, in his Epistle to the Galatians. 



