TERRACED SLOPES IN NORTH TYNEDALE. 51 



were at least fair judges, not only of the best elevation midway 

 up tlie hill slopes, but also of the most favourable aspects for 

 their simple husbandry. 



The other objection has been suggested in connection with the 

 smallness of the portion of cultivated ground on the level plat- 

 forms of the terraces, in comparison with the supposed require- 

 ments of the ancient people who formed them. And, indeed, if 

 we were to judge from the data afforded by the social habits and 

 necessities of the inhabitants of the valley in the present day, or 

 even in mediaeval times, it would be so valid as to be insuperable. 

 But we must remember that the rude population whom we con- 

 sider to have used this terrace -culture, though perhaps more nu- 

 merous than at the present day, were probably only emerging 

 from a state of comparative barbarism. There is every reason 

 to believe that the cleared banks or terraces, then closely sur- 

 rounded by dense natural v,^oods, represent the whole area of 

 soil devoted to the growth of cereals by the pre-Roman occu- 

 pants of the rude encampments, the hill forts, and the lowland 

 fastnesses, of which so many vestiges yet remain in the district. 

 Probably they were Celts, not of the earlier but of the later mi- 

 gration — not the Gadhelic but the Cymric branch — who left only 

 occasionally the fishing in the meres and "loughs," or forsook 

 the hunting-field (where they pursued the elk, the deer, the bear, 

 the wolf, and the wild ox — whose remote descendants still exist 

 at Chillingham — in the primeval forests which once clothed these 

 valley slopes and uplands under the Cheviot range) to till these 

 very ledges with such inefficient implements, made, it may be, 

 of stags' horns and crooked branches of trees, as were used by 

 the inhabitants of the lake -dwellings of Switzerland in contem- 

 porary times, previous to or in the beginning of the Christian 

 era. Several querns (hand-mills of a primitive form, in one in- 

 stance of red granite, but usually of hard freestone, for crushing 

 and grinding the corn) have been found on the sites of early 

 British forts in the immediate vicinity of the terrace lines, as in 

 the Warden Hill camp, which encircles about three acres with 

 its triple rampart ; and in the High Shield Green camp, opposite 

 to the culture-ledges on Buteland ridge. A most instructive fact 



