286 TYXEDALE ESCARPMENTS; 



these ancients gave them. No configuration could have better 

 served their purpose than this cresting ridge. Always steep, 

 and often perfectly mural on its north side, facing the Cale- 

 donian enemy, on the south where the Roman camps lie, it 

 declines in a long, easy slope. It was thus at once a favourable 

 camping ground and a splendid natural vantage ; and the cohorts 

 could often overlook their enemies in triumphant security almost 

 fi'om their very dwellings. (See Woodcut 'Ko. 1.) 



The northern outlook from this ridge — drearily familiar in its 

 former aspect, doubtless, to Eoman soldiers, — is over a series of 

 huge billows, parallel with the main ridge, and with it disposed 

 as if rolling before a gale from the S.S.E. Each billow rises 

 evenly fi'om a trough behind it, and on the further side can be 

 seen either curving smoothly forward, or raising itself higher aloft 

 and falling almost perpendicularly. Looked at sideways, these 

 ridges are stiffer and more rectilinear. So viewed, they less re- 

 semble billows than a series of different-sized wedges, each broad- 

 ening forward in a plane of some six to twelve degrees incline, 

 until its gradual rise is checked by an abrupt descent, at the foot 

 of which another sloping plane begins. The interspaces are 

 wedge -sliaped like the elevations, and might serve as their 

 counterparts. 



For another aspect of the scene we may choose some elevated 

 stand-point facing the broad ends of the ridges, — the crests of the 

 billows. In front of us now lies, as it were, a grand succession 

 of ramparts and earthworks, sometimes serried in nearly unbro- 

 ken ranks, sometimes breached by gaps or weatliered into waved 

 outlines, and sometimes represented only by dctaclied and insu- 

 lated embankments marking tlie decay of large intermediate 

 portions. Darkly rising in the back ground, like a fro\vning 

 battlement of which all in front arc but outworks, is generally 

 to be seen the Great Whinsill, — the basaltic ridge crowned with 

 the lloraan Wall ; now ranging as if built upon a level basement, 

 and again rising to some commanding heiglit trenched and tcr- 

 racc'l in front. Its general a])j)earance is one of grim impregna- 

 ])ility, but none the less it is marked by all the symptoms of 

 decay presented by the others; broken, gapped, occasionally 



