Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/214

200 up materials of a sausage. One can easily see, when standing on this brassy-looking crown of the Wrekin, or when looking at the contour of the hill from a distance, that the name it bears is not Celtic but Latin, Saxonized in that queer, quaint way in which our common and remote ancestors served even classical words of Italian origin. I have already noticed the marked resemblance of the sister hill to an elephant couchant The Roman soldiers, as they penetrated up into the country on the Severn, then its only broken road, must have been equally struck with the resemblance of this little mountain to the head of a wild bull, or of the urus, surmounted by a helmet. When they came to pitch their camp upon it, and see what manner of brazen-looking helmet it wore in the Bladder Stone, and to plant their flag-staff upon it, the fancy was strikingly realized, and it would have been the most natural thing in the world for them to call the hill Uriconus. The rank and file of the soldiery would have shortened the word by a syllable in pronunciation, and called it Uricon, and the half-Latinized population of the district would have adopted the same appellation. As the Romans probably had neither an English w or i in their alphabet, they would have spelt and pronounced the word Urecon, and that has done better than a hundred other Latin words in coming down to the present day through such a