From John O'Groats to Land's End / Or, 1372 miles on foot; A book of days and chronicle of adventures by two pedestrians on tour

by John Anderton Naylor; Robert Anderton Naylor

Hannah More, who was born in 1745, wrote a large number of stories chiefly of a religious character, and was said to have earned £30,000 by her writings, amongst them a religious tract bearing the title of "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain." We found he was not a mythical being, for David Saunders, the shepherd referred to, was a real character, noted for his homely wisdom and practical piety, and, as Mrs. More described him, was quite a Christian Hero. He resided at Great Cherwell, near Lavington, where his house was still pointed out to visitors. A typical shepherd of Salisbury Plain was afterwards pictured by another lady, and described as "wearing a long black cloak falling from neck to heels, a round felt hat, like a Hermes cap without the wings to it, and sometimes a blue milk-wort or a yellow hawk-weed in the brim, and walking with his plume-tailed dog in front leading his sheep, as was customary in the East and as described in the Scriptures—"the sheep follow him, for they know his voice."

We did not see one answering to that description as we crossed the Plain, but no doubt there were such shepherds to be found.

The sky had been overcast that day, and it was gloomy and cloudy when we reached Stonehenge. Without a house or human being in sight, the utter loneliness of the situation seemed to add to our feelings of wonder and awe, as we gazed upon these gigantic stones, the remains of prehistoric ages in England. We had passed through the circles of stones known as the "Standing Stones of Stenness" when we were crossing the mainland of the Orkney Islands on our way to John o' Groat's, but the stones we now saw before us were much larger. There had been two circles of stones at Stonehenge, one inside the other, and there was a stone that was supposed to have been the sacrificial stone, with a narrow channel in it to carry off the blood of the human victims slain by the Druids. In that desolate solitude we could almost imagine we could see the priests as they had been described, robed in white, with oak crowns on their heads, and the egg of a mythical serpent round their necks; we could hear the cries and groans of the victims as they were offered up in sacrifice to the serpent, and to Bel (the sun). Tacitus said they held it right to stain their altars with the blood of prisoners taken in war, and to seek to know the mind of the gods from the fibres of human victims. One very large stone outside the circles was called the "Friar's Heel," the legend stating that when the devil was busy erecting Stonehenge he made the observation to himself that no one would ever know how it had been done. This remark was overheard by a friar who was hiding amongst the stones, and he replied in the Wiltshire dialect, "That's more than thee can tell," at which the devil took up a big stone to throw at him, but he ran away as fast as he could, so that the stone only just grazed his heel, at the place where it now stands.

DRUIDICAL REMAINS, STONEHENGE.

We walked about these great stones wondering how they could have been raised upright in those remote times, and how the large stones could have been got into position, laid flat on the tops of the others. Many of the stones had fallen down, and others were leaning over, but when complete they must have looked like a circle of open doorways. The larger stones, we afterwards learned, were Sarsen Stones or Grey Wethers, of a siliceous sandstone, and were natural to the district, but the smaller ones, which were named the blue stones, were quite of a different character, and must have been brought from a considerable distance. If the ancient Welsh story could be believed, the blue stones were brought over in ships from Ireland after an invasion of that country under the direction of Merlin the Wizard, and were supposed to be mystical stones with a medicinal value. As to the time of the erection of these stones, we both agreed to relegate the matter to the mists of antiquity. Some thought that because Vespasian's Camp was on Amesbury Hill, Stonehenge might have been built by the Romans in the time of Agricola, but others, judging perhaps from the ancient tombs in the neighbourhood, thought it might date backwards as far as 2,000 years B.C. Nearly all agreed that it was a temple of the worshippers of the sun and might even have been erected by the Phoenicians, who must have known how the Egyptians raised much heavier stones than these. By some Stonehenge was regarded as the Round Temple to Apollo in the land of the Hyperboreans, mentioned by Hecatoens in the sixth century B.C., and after the Phoenicians it was supposed to have been used by the Greeks, who followed them as traders with the British tin mines. According to this theory, the Inner Ellipse or Horseshoe of Blue Stone was made by them, the Druids adopting it as their temple at a much later date.

STONEHENGE.

"Amongst the ruling races of prehistoric times the father sun-god was the god on the grey white horse, the clouds, and it was this white horse—the sun-god of the limestone, flint, and chalk country—-which was the god of Stonehenge, the ruins of which describe the complete ritual of this primeval worship. The worshippers of the sun-god who built this Temple must, it was thought, have belonged to the Bronze Age, which theory was supposed to have been confirmed by the number of round barrow tombs in the neighbourhood. It was also noted that the white sun-horse was still worshipped and fed daily at Kobé, in Japan."

Stonehenge had been visited by Pepys, who described the stones in his Diary as being "as prodigious as any tales as I had ever heard of them, and worth going this journey to see"; and King Charles II had counted them over several times, but could not bring them twice to the same number, which circumstance probably gave rise to the legend that no two people ever counted the number alike, so of course we did not attempt to count them. But the king's head must have been uneasy at the time he counted them, as it was after the Battle of Worcester, when he was a fugitive, retreating across the country in disguise and hidden by his friends until he could reach the sea-coast of Sussex, and escape by ship from England. One of his hiding-places was Heale House, about four miles from Stonehenge, where the lady of the house had hidden him in what was known as the "Priest's Hole," arrangements having been made for some friends to meet him at Stonehenge, and accompany him a stage farther towards the south. His friends, however, had been delayed a little on their way, so they did not reach Stonehenge at the appointed hour; and Charles whiled away the time by counting and recounting the stones.