Hasted (Hist. of Kent, iii, 1790, p. 752, note a) says that ‘all the learned agree that Barham down was his [Caesar’s] main camp, to which from his landing in the Downs by Mongeham, Sutton, Eythorne, Barston, and Snowdown, there is a continual course of military works’, &c. (see also vol. iv, 1799, p. 163). But in the time of the ‘learned’ contemporaries and predecessors of Hasted, it was not yet understood that the question whether this or that mound was a ‘military work’, and the further question whether it had been constructed by Romans, should be settled not by imagination, but by pick and shovel.
Professor Flinders Petrie (Archaeol. Cant., xiii, 1880, p. 12) remarks that ‘the works on Barham Down, half a mile NE. of Kingston, appear to be ancient’; but, being a competent archaeologist, he does not suggest that they were made by Caesar.
[3428] Caesar in Kent, p. 186. When Mr. Vine (ib., p. 185) gravely appeals to ‘the direct statement recorded on the chart found in Dover Castle, that “Caesar, having landed at Deal, afterwards conquered the Britons on Barham Down”’, one can only wonder why he does not also cite a ‘direct statement’ more ancient even than Camden’s ‘chart’,—the statement of Nennius, that Caesar’s second invasion took place three years after the first.
[3429] Vol. ii, 1814, p. 9.
[3430] Mr. George Payne (Collectanea Cantiana, p. 172) speaks of ‘a great oppidum in Pine Wood, Littlebourne’; but no trace of an entrenchment in this wood is to be found in the 6-Inch Ordnance Map (Sheet 47).
[3431] See pp. 664-5, supra.
[3432] Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd ser., iii, 1864-7, p. 506.
[3433] Archaeol. Cant., vii, 1868, pp. li-lii.
[3434] See p. 674, supra.
[3435] Ib.