A HILL- TOP STRONGHOLD. 257 



We find it hard, no doubt, to imagine nowadays that 

 once upon a time England was almost as thickly covered 

 with hill-top villages (though on minor heights) as Italy 

 is in the present century. Yet such was undoubtedly the 

 case in prehistoric times. I know no better instance of 

 the way these stockaded villages were built than the 

 magnificent group of antique earthworks in Dorset and 

 Devon which rings round with a double row of fortresses 

 the beautiful valley of the Axminster Axe. There, on 

 one side, a long line of strongholds built by the Duro- 

 triges caps every jutting down and hill-top on the southern 

 and eastern bank of the river, while facing them, on the 

 opposite northern and western side, rises a similar series 

 of Damnonian fortresses, crowning the corresponding 

 Devonshire heights. Lambert's Castle, Musberry Castle, 

 Hawksdown Castle, and so forth, the local nomencla- 

 ture still calls them, but they are castles, or castra, only 

 in the now obsolete Roman sense ; prehistoric earth- 

 works, with dyke and trench, once stockaded with wooden 

 palings on top, and enclosing the huts and homes of the 

 inhabitants. The river ran between the hostile terri- 

 tories ; each village held its own strip of land below its 

 fortress-height, and drove up its cattle, its women, and 

 its children, in times of foray, to the safety of the kraal 

 or hill-top encampment. 



In such a condition of society, of course, every com- 

 munity was absolutely dependent upon its own territory 

 for the means of subsistence. And wherever the means 

 of subsistence existed, a village was sure to spring up hi 

 time upon the nearest hill-top. That is how the oldest 

 Fiesoie of all first came to be perched there. It was a 



