36 
JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
of a travelled audience ; we are not sure but something like it may- 
be seen in La Yendee, and other parts of France contiguous to La 
Rochelle; but that helps our theory. We believe that earth- 
mounds sometimes occur in the northern marches — along North- 
umbrian dales; they may be found elsewhere; but this we do 
know, that these hedges, whether built by Celt or Saxon, are 
found in Waterford, Cork, and Kerry. 
Whoever may traverse the valley of the Suir will see again, 
not only the Devonian hedge-bank, but the farmhouse of the very 
oldest type extant; of which a few yet remain in Devon and 
Cornwall, outstanding relics of the days that are dead. Moreover, 
it is a singular fact that several plants of the " Green Isle" are 
found in West Cornwall, such as the Irish heath and the Hookeria 
moss, which occur nowhere else in Britain. 
Again, in the south-west of Ireland crop up at intervals some 
species identical with those in the Asturias of Spain; this intimates 
a kindred flora, and, it is thought, points to the time "when a great 
continent stretched across the Atlantic from Spain to Ireland, 
which must have included the western extremity of England, for 
several of the plants found in the British Isles — only in Cornwall 
and Devon — are natives of the Spanish Peninsula." 
Then may not the old homes and older hedges of County Waterford, 
so much resembling those of West Britain, point to the kindred 
races of the sister isle who fought the Saxon in the Arthurian age, 
and left their landmarks upon Damnonia in lines wide-spread and 
self-enduring? because, yearly renewed by nature, they are 
almost perdurable, and, by the hand of time alone, nearly as 
ineffaceable as nature herself. 
In short, is it not a Celtic picture ? May not both the one and 
the other be a sign-manual of that diminished but immutable 
family, whose offspring in the wilds of Connaught to-day will curse 
the Saxon in the same words which his forefather used thirteen 
hundred years ago? Not that we need suppose the Saxon settler had 
no hand in the work ; for doubtless some of our hedges rose with 
"the settlement itself — the 1 Cote ' or the i Worthy ' — whose 
primitive name tells us at once that it was founded in the earlier 
days of Saxondom." And strangers in the west- country, from 
that day to this, have conformed to the west-country fashion ; but 
the followers of Hengist and Horsa did never originate a system 
so different from that "which usually marks the Teutonic settle- 
