A Revieiv of " Pre-historic England." 



243 



afforded by the stones to a flock of sheep), and the ' Devil's Den/ 

 It may be that the syllables of some forgotten speech have been, 

 in the latter phrase, translated into an incongruous vernacular," 

 p. 399. 



The reader of this sentence, who knows anything about the 

 Wiltshire downs and the antiquities to be found upon them, would 

 naturally suppose when his eyes had reached the words "strew the 

 ground," that the writer of the article was going to speak of 

 A.bury and Stonehenge, and to prove that they had been the sites 

 of towns and fortresses ; — but what is his astonishment, when he 

 gets to the end of it, and finds that the towns and fortresses 

 in question were, the one in the valley of stones adjoining 

 the public road, called the Grey Wethers ; and the other in Clat- 

 ford bottom, where the cromlech called the " Devil's Den " was 

 reared ? 



As the reader proceeds, however, he soon discovers the cause of 

 the especial value and importance which the writer attaches to 

 each of the stones which are to be seen erect or prostrate upon the 

 Marlborough Downs and upon Salisbury Plain. 



They are not, according to him, of local origin. Mr. Lockhart 

 Ross, late Vicar of Abury, who, in his simplicity, had stated in 

 his little book called " The Druidical Temples at Abury, with some 

 account of Silbury, Wilts," that " the stones which compose the 

 temples at Abury, were evidently brought, like those of Stonehenge, 

 from Marlborough Downs, where they lie on the surface in great 

 numbers, and of all dimensions," meets with severe treatment at 

 the hands of his reviewer. It is fortunate for other benighted 

 individuals, who have ventured to say the same in print, that our 

 writer seems to know nothing at all about them or their writings. 

 His own view is, that " the large number of blocks which strew 

 the face of the rolling downs that are connected with Salisbury 

 plain" had been wrongly attributed by " earlier enquirers" to a 

 local origin ; and that " the fact is unquestionable, that the whole 

 of this large quantity of building material has been transported 

 from some far distant quarry or quarries ;" or, as he says in another 

 place, " from a site so distant as to be problematical ;" that it is 



