Much of the upper course of the Avon lies across Salisbury Plain, where it cleaves that table-land of the chalk by a valley full of sudden but not ungraceful bends and secluded nooks, each bright and rich with vegetation, and in almost every bend a village and its church, there being twenty of the latter in the same number of miles between the entrance of the Avon into the chalk at Beaching-Stoke and the expansion of its ravine at Salisbury. The lower valley is broad and flat, and the waters flow freely in many inosculating channels. The lowlands are laid out as rich water meadows, the uplands studded with masses of oak, elm, and beech, the skirts of the adjacent New Forest. Nothing can be more wild, more natural, nor yet more indebted to the labour and taste of man.
For antiquities, every part of the broad plain of the chalk is dotted over with marks of human habitation, warfare, or sepulture. Almost every headland is crowned by a camp recognised as British by its outline following the irregularities of the ground. Upon its northern frontier may be seen Easton and Pewsey, Lidbury, Sidbury, Chisenbury, Casterley, Broadbury, and Bratton; and, on the southern, Durrington, Amesbury, Quarley, Ogbury, Winterbourne, Grovely, Belbury, and Old Sarum, a few only, though the most considerable, of the defensive earthworks. Lower down the valley and nearer to the sea, the ground is rather less strong, and the earthworks of the British age perhaps less numerous, but there are not wanting examples of large area and great strength, such as Clearbury, Whichbury, Chiselbury, Tisbury, Winkelbury, and, still further south, Dudsbury, Badbury, and Spettisbury, which remain but little altered. Stonehenge, the grandest of British antiquities, and probably the only one in this immediate district neither military nor sepulchral, stands on the right bank of the Avon, scarce a mile from its waters, and only six from the fortress of Old Sarum.
The Roman remains of the district are considerable, and characteristic of the people. They consist almost wholly of roads. Old Sarum, though certainly of British origin, is the centre of several great roads, which radiated from it towards the Roman settlements at Bath, Marlborough, Winchester, Silchester, Ilchester, and Dorchester, and upon these and between them are various works of the same people, though their camps, being rarely defended by formidable works in earth, and being usually on low and accessible ground, have very frequently disappeared before the ploughshare.
The English, the scourge of the later Britons, and their successors by the right of many a hard-won contest in the Wiltshire territory, notwithstanding their pagan ferocity, have left traces which speak but of law and order. Their dragon’s teeth have grown up, not, as might have been expected, in armed men, but in waving cornfields, enclosed pastures, parochial boundaries, and those various subdivisions of the land the very existence of which implies peace and private property. To these later invaders may be attributed such earthworks as Downton, the Devizes, and Ludgershal, and such ecclesiastical foundations as Wimborne and Christchurch. The Norman remains in and about the valley of the Avon differ in no material respect from those in other parts of England, being grafted, where circumstances admitted of it, upon the existing works. Thus the grand earthworks at the Devizes, at Marlborough, at Ludgershal, at Twynham, all probably of English origin, were crowned with keeps of masonry, as was the central mound at Old Sarum, and on the borders of the district the very curious work at Wareham, and the natural, but early occupied hill, at Corfe.
Old Sarum is a very noteworthy place; in some respects the most noteworthy in Britain. Selected at some remote period and fortified with appliances of a simple character, it is the principal stronghold of a district very rich in military earthworks, and which at one time was the resort of inhabitants whose huts and wigwams, and the monuments of their superstition, covered the adjacent downs, and whose sepulchral monuments, ascending to the stone age, point, by their contents, to an early, and, by their number, to a long-continued population. The earlier and later Britons, Celtic or Belgic tribes, the Romans, and the English, have each here left traces of their rule; the Celt, partly in the fragments of an ancient nomenclature, but chiefly in mere material works, curious, indeed, and grand, but which are in no way connected with the later inhabitants of the country; the Romans, in those marvellous public ways, many of which are still in use; and the English in those names, boundaries, and customs, which are associated with our religion and our civilisation.
Nevertheless, the mound of Old Sarum is a spot on which the descendant of the Welsh-speaking Britons has a right to feel pride. All around it savours of the remote antiquity of his race. The Norman fortress, the city, the cathedral church, have all vanished; their very ruins have perished, and the knowledge of their arrangements has only been recovered by the accident of a rainless summer. Even the traces of Roman and English residence within the vast enclosure are uncertain and obscure. The seats of spiritual and civil authority were removed in the thirteenth century, and the military sway did not long survive. Political power, indeed, by a strange anomaly, lingered there until our own day, and is redeemed from oblivion only by its accidental connection with the name of the elder Pitt. But this also has departed. The bare and gaunt banks and mounds, the skeleton of the past life, are all that is left, and here, as at Stonehenge, the memory of the Briton is once more predominant.
OLD SARUM.
Wyman & Sons, Gᵗ. Queen Sᵗ. London.
- Keep or Inner Ward.
- Outer Ward.
- Main Gate.
- West Gate.
- Cathedral and Cloisters.