Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/346

 3IO Hampshi7'e Folklore.

aware, only as Vandyke or Andyke or Dytch. Woden has nominal ownership of another earthwork, — also with a wide ditch, — near Linkenholt, so possibly the Van or An is a corruption of Wandyke here, due to the proximity of Andover and the suggestive similarity of the first syllables. Now this is of interest because one of the few long barrows, — " Graves of Giants" in Hampshire, — lies but two miles to the south of the Andyke, while Woden's Dyke lies in a line between the great camps of Fosbury and Beacon Hill, and, according to Shore, there are traditions of a giant (Dun Drovy) in the neighbourhood of Woodcot and Crux Easton, — practically on that line,^'' — while a tumulus on Breamore Down is still known as " Giant's Grave," thus giving, within a radius of twenty miles, the full connection of Grim, Devil, Woden, and Giants.

Nor is this all the earthworks have to tell us. A little more than two miles north-east of Andover a Devil's Ditch runs from the old Roman Portway south to a modern plantation on the side of the South-Western Rail- way cutting, on the further side of which a rough -lane leads to Chapman's ford. This lane is, to me, one of the most interesting things in the whole county. Roughly to be traced from east to west, passing by, but not through, Silchester and Andover, and bearing south-west to Sarum itself, sections of it are known respectively as the Sheep Way, the Sheep Drove, the Harrow Way, the Cattle Drove, the Ox Way, the Ox Grove, and the Ox Drove, and as such it is to be linked up with the prehistoric track- ways of Wilts, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall. Mr. Belloc, when he debonairly jaunted, pen in hand as befits the journalist, along the " Old Way " from Winchester to Canterbury, complacently noted that " the neglected western end from Farnham to Stonehenge ... is now hardly to be recognised at all";^'^ but I have tramped

^ T. W. Shore, h'isiojy of Hafupshire, p. 5. -'^H. Belloc, The Old Koad (190^), p. ST.