340 Notes on the Border of Wilts and Hants. 



be, " Oh ?m-fortunate hero, sleeping" below, that had no bard to tell 

 us what you did, or even who you were ! " We need not, therefore, 

 pause over these sepulchral mounds, but go on to a great natural 

 hill with an artificial summit, called 



Cidbury. 



This is curious from its geological structure. It is a hill of chalk 

 standing boldly up on a plain of chalk, but when in your excursion 

 you reach the top, you will find it capped with a stratum of round 

 flint pebbles. How came a bed of water-rolled pebbles at that 

 isolated elevation ? The explanation is, that they are the remains 

 of a stratum which at one time overlaid the whole of the chalk 

 district, but at some later period has been washed away. Relics of 

 strata once super-incumbent, such as beds of gravel, sand, and clay 

 are frequently found on the highest tops of the chalk downs : those 

 of clay sometimes of the proper quality for making bricks. 



The summit of- Cidbury was, at some remote period, formed into 

 a camp ; and from the principal entrance into the encampment there 

 is a trace of a long causeway leading towards Everley. Near this 

 causeway are groups of round cavities, little pits in the ground, 

 considered to be the remains of an ancient British village. It seems 

 that, after the fashion still in use in some of the savage islands 

 described in books of voyages, they dug large round pits in the 

 earth, and covered them over with conical roofs, of rafters and thatch. 

 There is a very remarkable collection of these half-subterranean 

 wigwams at a place called Pen Pits, on the western border of Wilts, 

 near Mere and Stourhead. For half-a-mile, or so, all over the side 

 of the hill the ground is honeycombed in circular pits. It was for 

 a long time a doubt what they really had been : but the opinion 

 seems now to be fully adopted that they really were ancient dwelling- 

 places. We read in the classic writers of a people called Troglodytes, 

 dwellers in caves in Ethiopia. There are Troglodytes in Liverpool 

 to this day — a large part of the population actually living in hovels 

 cut out of the solid sandstone rock. There is, therefore, nothing at 

 all incredible in the idea of our ancestors having shewn a preference 

 for burrowing, like rabbits, in dry chalk and soft sand. 



