Singularly enough, however, Warner[79] states that a large mass of tin was found on the very site of this old Roman road, or, rather, as the fact of the mere shapeless mass would prove, on the older British track. Not only, too, was tin brought here from Cornwall, but also, in later times, lead from the Mendip Hills. Pigs of it have been picked up on a branch of the same Roman road running from Uphill on the Severn to Salisbury, and from thence joining the Leap road. One of them, stamped with the name of Hadrian, is now in the Bath Museum. We are thus enabled to connect Leap with the famous passage of the Greek historian.
Sir George Lewis’s theory has, too, been singularly corroborated in other directions, especially by the large quantities of bronze ornaments found during the excavations in the Swiss Lakes, 1853 and 1854, the metals of which could only have been brought there by an overland route.
Further, too, we must not reject the account of Diodorus, because he says that at low tide the tin was carried over in carts. We must remember the extremely indefinite views of the ancients on all geographical subjects. The vaguest ideas were held, especially about Britain. Erring in a different direction, the mistake is not so bad as Pliny’s, in making the Island six days’ sail from England. There seems, however, a most natural explanation, that Diodorus, not having been there, took for granted the wild traditions and rumours which reached him, and which, even in these days, with only the slightest possible variation of form, still hold their ground with the Forest peasantry, in the legend that the stone of which Beaulieu Abbey is built was brought over the dry bed of the Solent, in carts, from the Binstead Quarries.
Still the passage is not without the further difficulty, that Diodorus seems, from the context, to have supposed that the Island was situated close to where the tin was dug. This, again, must be set down to that ignorance of geography, which has involved all Greek writers in such extraordinary mistakes.
Leap itself is now nothing but a village, with a scattered agricultural population; some few, however, maintaining themselves by fishing in the summer, and in the winter by shooting the ducks and geese which flock to the creeks and harbours of the Solent. Leaving it, and still keeping westward, we come to the Beaulieu river, where, in the autumn, after the heavy floods from the Forest, the salmon leap and sport in the freshets. The road now winds past Exbury by the side of thick copses which fringe the river. At last, at Hill Top, we reach Beaulieu Heath, and, in the far distance, the green foliage of the Forest hangs cloudlike in the air, whilst down in the valley lies the village of Beaulieu.
The Norman Doorway of Fawley Church.
CHAPTER VI.
BEAULIEU ABBEY.
Arches of the Chapter House.