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Then they returned to the car and ran round by a winding road
into the wonder of Avebury. They found a clean little inn
there kept by pleasant people, and they garaged the car in
the cowshed and took two rooms for the night that they might
the better get the atmosphere of the ancient place. Wonderful
indeed it is, a vast circumvallation that was already two
thousand years old before the dawn of British history; a
great wall of earth with its ditch most strangely on its
inner and not on its outer side; and within this enclosure
gigantic survivors of the great circles of unhewn stone that,
even as late as Tudor days, were almost complete. A whole
village, a church, a pretty manor house have been built, for
the most part, out of the ancient megaliths; the great wall
is sufficient to embrace them all with their gardens and
paddocks; four cross-roads meet at the village centre. There
are drawings of Avebury before these things arose there, when
it was a lonely wonder on the plain, but for the most part
the destruction was already done before the MAYFLOWER sailed.
To the southward stands the cone of Silbury Hill; its shadow
creeps up and down the intervening meadows as the seasons
change. Around this lonely place rise the Downs, now bare
sheep pastures, in broad undulations, with a wart-like barrow
here and there, and from it radiate, creeping up to gain and
hold the crests of the hills, the abandoned trackways of that
forgotten world. These trackways, these green roads of
England, these roads already disused when the Romans made
their highway past Silbury Hill to Bath, can still be traced
for scores of miles through the land, running to Salisbury
and the English Channel, eastward to the crossing at the
Straits and westward to Wales, to ferries over the Severn,
and southwestward into Devon and Cornwall.
The doctor and Sir Richmond walked round the walls, surveyed
the shadow cast by Silbury upon the river flats, strolled up
the down to the northward to get a general view of the
village, had tea and smoked round the walls again in the warm
April sunset. The matter of their conversation remained
prehistoric. Both were inclined to find fault with the
archaeological work that had been done on the place. "Clumsy
treasure hunting," Sir Richmond said. "They bore into Silbury
Hill and expect to find a mummified chief or something
sensational of that sort, and they don't, and they report
nothing. They haven't sifted finely enough; they haven't
thought subtly enough. These walls of earth ought to tell
what these people ate, what clothes they wore, what woods
they used. Was this a sheep land then as it is now, or a
cattle land? Were these hills covered by forests? I don't
know. These archaeologists don't know. Or if they do they
haven't told me, which is just as bad. I don't believe they
know.
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