18 APPEARANCE OF THE LANDES. 



Woden, who is still supposed to drive his spectral hounds across the 

 silent wastes of Dartmoor. Celtic or Cymric memorials, as we have 

 previously hinted, are very abundant and very various. There are 

 cromlechs, where the Britons buried their dead ; stone pillars, with 

 which they commemorated their priests and heroes ; avenues of 

 upright stones leading up to the circles, where, perhaps, their priests 

 celebrated their religious rites ; kistvaens, or stone-chests, containing 

 the body unburned; tolmens, or holed stones, whose meaning cannot 

 be determined, but which may probably have had some astronomical 

 uses; bridges, huts, and walled villages, all bearing traces of the 

 handiwork of our ' rude forefathers.' " 



For the counterpart of this we must go considerably to the north 

 of the Landes ; but we find it in Brittany, which, geologically speak- 

 ing, may be regarded as a prolongation of our English mountains, to 

 which, with all the north-west coast of France, they were formerly 

 united. " Brittany," writes Mangin, " belongs to what geologists call 

 the primitive and intermediary formations. It is divided into three 

 belts or longitudinal trenches : those of the north and south consist 

 of primitive rocks, granite, and porphyry ; the central appertains to 

 a more recent formation, to the group of intermediary or secondary 

 rocks, composed in the main of schists and mica-schists, quartz, and 

 gneiss. Schist prevails over a considerable area, and is prolonged to 

 the very extremity of the peninsula. These hard, compact, imper- 

 vious rocks, are entirely bare in many places ; elsewhere, and over a 

 great extent, they are covered but by a thin layer of clayey and 

 sandy earth, where the sudden slopes of the soil do not allow the 

 rains to settle. 



" Here are the plains, often of considerable dimensions, which, 

 bristling with rocks, and broken up by ravines, water-courses, and 

 marshes, constitute the Landes of Brittany. True deserts these, 

 relieved at distant points by an isolated hut, or by a wandering herd 

 of swine, lean cows, and meagre-looking horses, which obtain a scanty 

 subsistence from the heathery soil, sown here and there with tufts of 

 furze, broom, and fern. 



"Under a sky of almost continual sombreness, like that which 

 impends over the pottery districts of England, these landes present a 

 sufficiently sinister and uninviting aspect. The traveller, as he crosses 

 their sepulchral wastes, will hardly marvel that they were anciently 

 a chosen seat of Druidical worship. Like Dartmoor, they would 

 seem to have offered a peculiarly fitting arena for the rites and 

 ceremonies of a creed which we know to have been mysterious in 



