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at all, must have been raised against strangely less for- 
midable assailants than the Northumberland, East Yorkshire, 
Berkshire, and Somersetshire entrenchments. But certainly 
not less formidable in respect of bodily strength, for many 
of the masses of rock or stone, moved and placed in the con- 
struction of the specified defences, are such in size and 
weight as fairly to task the strength of as many of the 
existing dwellers in the district as can lay to their hands to 
help, and even with the appliances of gavelock and pick. 
Less formidable, therefore, in point of numbers or equip- 
ment, — nay, rather in numbers and equipment, — and specially 
as regards the last, as it appears to me. For I fancy ten men 
of Robin Hood's band, with their steel-headed shafts shot to 
a hand's breadth at three or four score yards, would have 
been a sore over-match for ten times their number of flint- 
arrow armed Celts, so long as they could choose their own 
distance, which, as attacking intrenchments, would always be 
at their own discretion ; while it would have been perilous 
indeed, in the face of such assailants, for the defenders to 
leave their cover and seek to decide the matter by a rush, 
and a hand-to-hand conflict. 
I pass from this topic, for the present, to dwell a little in 
detail on the memorials of this ancient race of fastness- 
builders, which are preserved for us in their burial-places ; 
many of them, indeed, equally specimens of building with 
the still remaining ramparts ; all of them constructed on 
precisely the same principles, and out of precisely the 
same kind of materials, as the ramparts themselves — 
piles of stone - fragments consolidated and heaped over 
with earth. 
I think that I may say I have a kind of personal 
acquaintance with from seventy to eighty large tumuli or 
barrows, and I suppose some hundreds of small ones ; and 
with the interior of not a few of either kind. The local 
