It was a very weird experience to pass unchallenged into the courtyard of the castle, filled with laughing, shouting and quarrelling soldiers. These men paid no attention to them, and Godmother led the way up a winding stone staircase to a pathway on the inner side of the battlements. From this height they had a wonderful view over the surrounding country, and as she gazed, Betty was lost in amazement.
The Monument, that great column to the top of which she had so recently climbed, was, she remembered, close to London Bridge. Therefore she must now be standing near the very same spot as that from which only this morning she had looked over London. It was an amazing thought.
She remembered the countless spires and domes and towers which rose far above their roofs, and the swarming traffic in all the streets.
Upon what a different scene she looked now! In place of the miles and miles of streets and houses, she saw along a narrow strip of the shore, right and left of the wooden bridge, a few steep lanes or alleys, lined with poor low dwellings. A few wharves and quays stretched along the bank of the river just below. There certainly a busy life went on, for men were loading and unloading boats. Behind the lanes leading down to the river, there was a belt of cultivated land, dotted over with gleaming one-storied dwellings which Godmother said were Roman villas, and beyond them, enclosing all the cultivated land, rose a strong wall with towers at intervals. But behind the wall came a long stretch of marshy ground, leading to the edge of a huge forest—a dark and gloomy and endless forest, clothing a line of hills, and stretching away, away, as far as eye could see.
Godmother was leaning on the parapet beside her.
“We are facing north now,” she said, and added suddenly, “You’ve been to Hampstead Heath, of course?”
Betty could not imagine what Hampstead Heath had to do with the scene upon which she was gazing, but she said, “Yes, we go nearly every Sunday.”
“Well, then, you have seen a tiny bit that is left of that great forest in front of you. There’s very little ‘forest’ about Hampstead Heath now, certainly, but such as it is, it is the descendant of that very one you see before you, which, a thousand years ago, stretched for hundreds of miles over this island.”
From the other side of the fortress, to which they presently moved, the view was equally strange, for here there was nothing to be seen but swampy land, just emerging from the water which everywhere surrounded it.
“We are looking south,” Godmother said, “and now that you see this great stretch of water right and left, you will understand why the first name of London was the lake fort.”