BOGS. 331 



very beautiful place. Tradition carries the history 

 no farther back than the reign of the last ghost, 

 and it had abdicated before the beginning of the 

 present century. The eyes of the most prying 

 antiquaries can trace nothing but the marks of the 

 chisel in the squared stones with which the frag- 

 ments of the walls are cased; but that is some- 

 thing, inasmuch as there is not now in the neigh- 

 bourhood, or even in the county, a freestone of 

 the same colour (old red sand- stone) that will 

 show the marks of the chisel so perfect after one 

 century. The walls have been grouted in the cen- 

 tral parts, but whether they are Roman or not 

 cannot be determined. There are camps of many 

 races about, some square, with the usual traces of 

 the Romans, and others oval, or round ; and there 

 are (or used to be) abundance of flint arrow-heads, 

 which the old women sometimes described as flying 

 about in the twilight and killing the cows, but 

 they have lain still for some years. 



The fields around are now mostly under tillage, 

 and yield a scanty and precarious crop to a most 

 laborious culture; but their natural productions 

 were, on the humid places, bent, and on the dry, 

 brown heath and white moss, or white moss and 

 brown heath, according as the soil was less or 

 more bad. These were symptoms miserable 

 enough to have succeeded to forests and groves ; 

 and if we could fill up the chasm in the succession, 

 we should have at least one satisfactory portion 

 of the history of vegetation ; but we want the 

 facts, and so conjecture would be useless. 



The mixture of lime in the fallen part of the 

 castle, had nursed the henbanes and hemlocks, and 

 other lurid plants which love such places, and 



