THE COUNTRY OF RICHARD JEFFERIES 5 



battle of Newbury. From Aldboiirne is a good walk 

 over the Downs to Marlborough by Stock Lane, on a steep- 

 banked track, with eyebright flowers underfoot and among 

 wayfaring trees, in sight of the oak and fir and hazel 

 of Aldbourne Chase in long, gentle hollows. Hereby 

 three deep tracks mount southward to Marlborough, and 

 presently cross the remains of a Roman road that goes 

 straight, though grassy, from Ogbourne to Mildenhall. 

 Thatched Mildenhall was a Roman station, as the turf 

 proclaims, and called Cunetio. At one time the children 

 there used often to pay their school-fees in Roman coin. 

 Now the slow sheep go past the barley-fields to Marl- 

 borough Fair, and the tired shepherd leans on his crooked 

 ash and says once to his dusty flock, *Coom along — coop !' 

 Traveller's joy and white bryony climb about the thorns. 



At Common Head, a mile south-east of Coate, the 

 Roman road, leaving Ermine Street at Wanborough 

 Nythe, crosses the Hungerford road on its way south to 

 Mildenhall, through Savernake Forest (as often called 

 Marlborough Forest by those living on the Marlborough 

 side of it), to Winchester. It crosses the Ridgeway near 

 Chisledon, under the hill that is crowned by the camp, 

 or ' castle,' and the beech-clump of Liddington. Between 

 it and the tiny colonies of Woodsend and Snap are more 

 prints of British settlements on the turf, with tumuli and 

 earthworks that make the earth look old, like the top bar 

 of a stile, carved by saunterers, bored by wasps, grooved 

 and scratched and polished again, or like a schoolboy's 

 desk that has blunted a hundred ingenious knives. Recent 

 theory suggests that the dark Iberic people found a refuge 

 in Wiltshire from the Celts, who, invaded in their turn, 

 held out long in the same land against the Saxons. 

 Jefferies himself finds Celtic traces in the place-names and 

 surnames of the neighbourhood. From near Woodsend, 

 a little way off the Roman road, and within Aldbourne 

 Chase, there is a spread of Downs, Inkpen supreme on the 

 south-east, Martinsell wood}^ and dark on the south, the 

 Devizes hills south-west. Thence there is a pleasant 



