268 



CherJdll Gleanings. 



mind. Before, however, taking any step in the matter I thought 

 that I would ask a very old man who was then living in the parish 

 whether he had ever heard of any researches having heen made 

 previously on the same site. So putting him one day in my pony 

 carriage I drove him up the road and showed him the depressions. 

 His face lighted up at once, and he told me that he had never 

 heard of anybody making searches there, but that he did mind that 

 ce it was from them pits that they digged out the vlints when they 

 was a-building some farm-house or other (I forget which) when he 

 were a buoy ! " So my theory of British habitations, and subsequent 

 paper and resultant kudos, all vanished together. And then my old 

 friend went on to point out the line of the ancient road, just below the 

 pits in question, which was only replaced by the new one at the be- 

 ginning o£ the present century. He had often driven the plough, 

 he told me, in his earlier days, on the site of the very road over 

 which we were then passing. The line of the older road may be 

 still seen very clearly, diverging from the modern one about a 

 hundred yards above the last house in Cherhill village, and coming 

 into it again at a place called " Needle-point," just at the top of 

 Beckhampton Field. This old road, I may add, possesses itself a not 

 inconsiderable amount of interest, there being much ground for 

 believing (as Mr. Smith points out in his " Antiquities of North 

 "Wilts ") that it follows the course of an old British trackway, and 

 that the banks which for some distance run along its sides were 

 intended for the purposes of fortification. 



One more reminiscence — scarcely as yet, perhaps, historical, but 

 destined soon to be so, and as such worthy, I think, of record in 

 these humble annals. And that is of the big bonfire which was 

 made on the Jubilee Day last year upon the highest point of 

 Oldborough Hill, just above our village. 



For the two days immediately preceding the 21st of June many 

 waggons had been busy in carting up to the top of the hill loads of 

 faggots, stakes, and shavings, to the mass of which I believe that 

 every cottager in the village, with one solitary exception, contributed. 

 "With these a pyre about 26ft. in diameter at base, and standing 

 S5ft high was constructed in the shape of a hollow cone, with four 



