Ixxvi. PORTESHAM AND BRIDEHEAD DISTRICT. 



distance the stones did look like sheep on the hillside. Again, 

 " Sarsen " was a simple term, a corruption of the word "Saracen," 

 which at one time was employed to designate anything that was 

 foreign. Geologists used the word "foreign stones" as country 

 people used the word " Saracen," both meaning pretty much the 

 same thing. But they were not all Druid stones. One would 

 use the word " Druid " when it was a Saracen stone or Sarsen 

 stone that had been employed by early man for any funerary 

 purpose. Then what was the nature of Sarsen stones ? If they 

 looked at the hill under Hardy's Monument, they would see two 

 or three gravel pits. The gravel was all as loose as they pleased. 

 It could be got out with the tap of a pick-axe. It consisted of 

 pebbles intercalated with sand. That gravel once spread all over 

 the chalk in that region, and in places the gravel became 

 cemented with a silicious cement. They would observe that all 

 the pieces of flint in a sarsen stone were rounded by the 

 action of water, and they now and then saw other stones ; 

 for instance, quartz. After the covering over of the chalk 

 downs with this Tertiary gravel and sand, the chalk under- 

 neath it began to wear away through the infiltration of rain, 

 and the surface became very uneven ; and so at Blagdon 

 they could see how the gravel dipped and followed inclines 

 down the sides of the hills ; and in doing that, however 

 cemented it may have been, it was bound to break up into these 

 great blocks, which remained scattered all over the face of the 

 country. Many of them had been built into walls and broken 

 up in various ways. And Neolithic men, whom people some- 

 times called "Druids," whenever they wanted to construct 

 anything, used these great blocks or megaliths. The Ordnance 

 Geological Survey map called these gravels Reading Beds ; but 

 geologists like Mr. Clement Reid and Mr. Aubrey Strahan, the 

 author of the Geological Memoir of Weymouth, 1898, considered 

 that they were rather Bagshot Beds. To turn to the Helstone 

 itself, it was sometimes called a cromlech and sometimes a 

 dolmen. Throughout England they were generally called 

 cromlechs ; but in Cornwall and Brittany dolmens. He himself 



