Concluding Remarks. 



277 



Though every care has been taken to avoid hasty, or merely 

 fanciful, conclusions, it is too much to expect to carry conviction in 

 all cases. This paper is put forth as, in a great measure, tentative 

 in its character, and is, at all events, an honest attempt to deal with 

 a subject, profoundly interesting, but nevertheless, from its very 

 nature, obscure and difficult. The writer will be fully content to 

 feel that he has been able to open a few chinks, through which to 

 let in a ray or two of light on the darkness of a period from which 

 we are separated by the mists of fourteen centuries. The examples 

 at all events are numerous enough to shew, that though three-score 

 generations have lived and died since they trod the soil of Britain, 

 the imprint of our Celtic ancestors is still to be traced on every side. 

 Their memorials are to be found moreover just where we might ex- 

 pect them. Hardly a word is there, in the purely Celtic portion of 

 the names, that speaks of home — or of an enclosed town — or even of 

 a fortified encampment. A faithful reflection this, of the habits of 

 our British forefathers, who, as chroniclers tell us, roamed amid the 

 woods, the fortresses which nature had provided for them — who, clad 

 in coarse raiment, lived on hard fare and in rude perishable huts — • 

 and who trusted not to walls and bulwarks, but to weapons, wielded 

 with a stout heart, by brawny sinewy arms. Is there not too a kind 

 of rude yet touching poetry in that part of our local nomenclature 

 which has reference to them, when we see the hill, the wold, the 

 moor, and the stream, again appearing as they existed before the 

 accidents of time and the spread of civilization had changed in some 

 sort their physical features ? Add to all these facts, the one on which 

 I have dwelt (see § 16 under Amesbury), that we have in our county, 

 in connection with the name of a British chieftain of the fifth 

 century, a memorial of primitive Christianity — a glimmering spark, 

 just visible through the murky darkness of intervening ages— proving 

 that, whatever we may have subsequently owed to Augustin, Rome 

 was not the first to kindle the torch of truth in Britain, and surely 

 we have enough in Wiltshire to interest even those who profess to 

 have no taste for archaeological pursuits. 



It is only right that I should acknowledge my great obligations, 

 in the preparation of this paper, to my old and valued friend, the 



