A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

The Roman Camp.

Yes, it's a magnificent Roman camp, and no mistake, with gates and ditch and mounds, all as complete as it was twenty years after the strong old rogues had left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the tableland, some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyrie. The ground falls away rapidly on all sides. Was there ever such turf in the whole world? You sink up to your ankles at every step, and yet the spring of it is delicious. There is always a breeze in the "camp," as it is called; and here it lies, just as the Romans left it.... It is altogether a place that you won't forget,—a place to open a man's soul and make him prophesy, as he looks down on that great vale spread out as the garden of the Lord before him, and wave on wave of the mysterious downs behind; and to the right and left the chalk hills running away into the distance, along which he can trace for miles the old Roman road, "the Ridgeway" ("the Rudge," as the country folk call it), keeping straight along the highest back of the hills;—such a place as Balak brought Balaam to and told him to prophesy against the people in the valley beneath. And he could not, neither shall you, for they are a people of the Lord who abide there.

King Alfred's Defeat of the Danes.

And now we leave the camp, and descend towards the west and are on the Ash-down. We are treading on heroes. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great battle, the battle of Ash-down, which broke the Danish power, and made England a Christian land. The Danes held the camp and the slope where we are standing—the whole crown of the hill, in fact. "The heathen had beforehand seized the higher ground," as old Asser says, having wasted everything behind them from London, and being just ready to burst down on the fair Vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, "and there the battle was joined with a mighty shout, and the pagans were defeated with great slaughter." After which crowning mercy the pious king, that there might never be wanting a sign and a memorial to the countryside, carved out on the northern side of the chalk hill, under the camp, where it is almost precipitous, the great Saxon white horse, which he who will may see from the railway, and which gives its name to the vale, over which it has looked these thousand years and more.

The Manger and the Dragon's Hill.

Right down below the White Horse is a curious deep and broad gully, called "the manger" [because it is right under the mouth of the White Horse], into one side of which the hills fall with a series of the most lovely sweeping curves, known as "the Giant's Stairs"; they are not a bit like stairs, but I never saw anything like them anywhere else, with their short, green turf, and tender bluebells, and gossamer and thistle-down gleaming in the sun, and the sheep paths running along their sides like ruled lines.

The other side of the Manger is formed by the Dragon's Hill, a curious little round self-confident fellow, thrown forward from the range, utterly unlike everything round him. On this hill some deliverer of mankind—St. George, the country folk used to tell me—killed a dragon. Whether it were St. George I cannot say; but surely a dragon was killed there, for you may see the marks yet where his blood ran down, and more by token the place where it ran down is the easiest way up the hillside. So far Thomas Hughes.

As a truthful chronicler, I must record that some of our party, tempted by the precipitous slope covered with luxuriant grass, slid down the hill from the White Horse into the Manger, sitting down on the turf and letting themselves go, with the result of wrecking a pair of trousers or so, and carrying away some portion of the fertile soil of Berks to Oxford.

The Blowing Stone.

Passing along the ridgeway to the west for about a mile, we may come to Wayland Smith's forge, a cave familiar to readers of Kenilworth, but we content ourselves with a distant view, and, descending the hill, turn to the east, and, after a brisk walk of three or four miles, we halt under a fine old tree in front of a cottage door, to see another object described in Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby, the celebrated Blowing Stone, "a square lump of stone, some three feet and a half high, perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian rat holes." It is chained to the tree and secured with a padlock. Instead of the innkeeper, for whom Mr. Hughes was so fearful lest he should burst or have apoplexy when he blew the stone, a very comely matron came out of the cottage and blew it for us—then we all blew it in turn. The sound is described exactly in the book: "a grewsome sound, between a moan and a roar, spreads itself away over the valley, and up the hillside, and into the woods at the back of the house, a ghost-like, awful voice." This stone is said to have been used in old times to give warning and summons in time of war.