ANCIENT TIMBER PORCH, LONG WITTENHAM (UNRESTORED).
Long Wittenham may well be called long. From the ancient cross at one end of it, past the church, it goes on and on in a single street, and finally loses itself indeterminately between making on the one hand for Clifton Hampden, and on the other for the vast hedgeless fields across which lies the way to Little Wittenham, one mile distant. Those widespreading fields of this district are a distinct and remarkable feature of this countryside. Whether they be pasture, or corn, or turnip fields, they give a sense of largeness and strangeness to the traveller in these parts, accustomed only to the little five- or six-acre enclosures of other neighbourhoods. Here vast fifty-acre expanses of wheat or swedes go in swooping undulations over the hillsides, and you rarely see the boundaries of them. These peculiarities of Berkshire agricultural conditions certainly make for economical farming, with less space wasted upon unproductive hedges; and they certainly also make for picturesqueness here, where the great double hill of Sinodun rises boldly in roughly pyramidal shape from the lower levels. There are huge prehistoric earthworks on the summit of Sinodun: vast concentric circumvallations and fosses reared by long-forgotten folk, the vastness of whose defensible works gives, almost like an arithmetical exercise, the measure of their fears. Who were those who slaved so strenuously at this fortification, and who those others against whose expected onslaught they made such preparations? Archæologists have their theories, indeed, but no one knows. Really, from all available evidence, it would appear that Sinodun was fortified from the very earliest times, and that each conquering race which settled in Britain, and in turn decayed in manhood and the arts of war, and so gave opportunity for a newer conquest at the hands of uncultured but virile barbarians, in turn occupied this hill-top and were attacked and slain in it, in those pitiless battles of extermination that were the usual features of the world’s youth.
Sinodun and its fellow-hill are in these times crested with plantations of trees, known far and near as “Wittenham Clumps”; and there is a third clump, a minimus infant brother, or poor relation, kind of clump, on a lesser eminence, not unremotely reminiscent of Landseer’s picture, “Dignity and Impudence.”
The traveller across Didcot downs, the boating-man on the Thames—all, in fact, who come within view of them—are obsessed by Wittenham Clumps, which dominate all views, and from the river, at any rate, are always appearing in the most unexpected quarters. Even the traveller by railway remarks them. Such an one, journeying along the Great Western main-line and gazing from the carriage-windows, sees those black blotches of trees on the hill-tops come whirling into view, and thinks of them in relation to his journey, with the mental note, “Now we are near Didcot.”
DAY’S LOCK, AND SINODUN HILL.