Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/29

Rh Cobchester. Broadbury was traversed by ancient roads. A little to the east of the Camp, which was on the Fosse Way, branched off the Via Regia that ran past Chimsworthy to Bratton Clovelly, and thence one branch by Headson, Banbury and Wrexon, led to Polson Bridge, where it fell in with the ancient paved road from Okehampton to Launceston. Another branch from Bratton by Wrexhill reached Lew Down at Lew Cross by the present National School. There is plenty of documentary evidence relative to the condition of this royal road, which in the Middle Ages was complained of as "muddy and bad." The great paved highway from Exeter over Lew Down, called Old Street, was struck a few years ago when the Prince of Wales, now King George V, visited Launceston, motoring over Lew Down. At the junction of the road from Stowford with the highway, in digging to plant a flag-staff, the workmen came on the paved surface. Some ten or twelve years ago a hoard of small coins was found under a fallen slab of granite near this road on the Down. I went to inspect it, and got specimens sent to the Museum at Plymouth. They were all of Constantine and Constantius, with one or two of Julian. The hoard had evidently belonged to a poor man who sat by the wayside begging, and who had died without recovering his store. An interesting account of the Fosse Road, the Via Regia, and the old paved way is to be found in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association for 1918. The object of these ancient highways keeping to downs and ridges of moorland was for avoidance of the morasses and the streams found in the valleys.

Across the brook at the bottom of our lawn was a little footbridge. My nurse was carrying me over in her arms, when the bridge gave way. Like a brave and self-sacrificing woman, she held me aloft, and allowed herself to fall on her back into the stream that flowed over stones, thereby bruising and injuring it. In later years, when she was married to a farmer, we children—we were three then—were delighted to visit her and drink milk out of her frog-cup. The peculiarity of this mug was that in it was a china frog, that was hidden when the cup was full, but as one drank, the head and front paws emerged, and then, with another long draught, the entire quadruped became visible.