Page:Tom Brown's School Days (6th ed).djvu/42

 you may well wonder and think it odd you never heard of this before; but, wonder or not as you please, there are hundreds of such things lying about England which wiser folk than you know nothing of and care nothing for. 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 left it. Here, right up on the highest point, from which they say you can see eleven counties, they trenched round all the table-land, some twelve or fourteen acres, as was their custom, for they couldn't bear anybody to overlook them, and made their eyry. 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, except that cairn on the east side left by her Majesty's corps of sappers and miners the other day, when they and the engineer officer had finished their sojourn there and their surveys for the ordnance map of Berkshire. 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.

And now we leave the camp and descend toward the west, and are on the Ashdown. We are treading on heroes. It is sacred ground for Englishmen, more sacred than all but one or two fields where their bones lie whitening. For this is the actual place where our Alfred won his great battle, the battle of Ashdown ("Æscendum" in the chroniclers), which broke the Danish power and