ON MENDIP
. ROUGHLY half-way-between- Cley Hill on the Wilt- shire-Somerset border and - Dolebury Camp above Churchill on western Mendip .lies. Maesbury Ring, at the -foot of which runs the RoMan Fosse Way froM Old Sarum to Uphill on- the Bristol Channel near that modern sprawl of pretentious hideousness, Weston-super-Mare. Maesbury has so suffered. from denudation. and other of time's -teeth that only one of the rings can be clearly . traced,. and that much gnawed and scraped away. Walk round that rampart and there will not be much of Smrierset that escapes the vision. Right away from the Bristol Hills, along the coastline and inward to Blackdown spreads that rich and - -sky-enamoured land, then flows out again to Quantock .and Exmoor, sweeps east- ward to Glastonbury Tor, and in a series of ridges and indentations loses itself in the line of the Dorset Downs southward and the Wiltshire uplands east. Between the two swells the visionary Mount of Camelot, which some call Cadbury Castle. Before -one's feet, with less than half a mile of walking to. survey it, lies an ordnance map of the broad-beaved western shire drawn to the scale of seventeen hundred and sixty yards to the mile.
The western rim of the vallum is plumed by a group of withered pines that emphasize its desolation and aloofness from the men of to-day. I went and stood by these pines and looked towards—Namancos and Bayona's Hold ?—no, Dolebury that perhaps I should never see again, for it was my last day and last pilgrimage in the western land. Once more I travelled back the ancient • track and heard the curlew's sweet sorrow above the bones of the dead within their barrows, and the babble of goldfinch, linnet and stonechat among the deserted lead-mines whose silver * had passed into their voices. I saw the magpie paddling his solitary way through a sea of air less lonely than the land that lay beneath him and still bearing the haekings of three thousand years ago upon its surface. And in my memory stood up those barrows, " mementos of mortality to living passengers," along the skyline of Priddy and Charter- house, whose harmony with Mendip is so perfect, and which yet were the work of man. Such was my barrow that I built to overlook the west, the memorial barrow piled of dear associations, the record of my wanderings, the beacon for my spirit whereto to fly from drabber days and look once more on Camelot, the Mount Desirable, not of dreams, but of a waking life.
Dolebury Camp is built on a low hill but throws an eagle glance over a sea and half of two counties. And there is nothing but the limitations of mortal sight in the way of seeing Cley Hill with its thoughtful brow from the stone rampart . of Dolebury,, where it swirls inward along the crest of the hill. If you go to Dolebury from Blacker's Hill near the Bath Road on eastern :Mendip past Priddy Nine Barrows and through Burlington Combe, where the blackbirds sing like angels and the yews crouch darkling against the grey limestone, there is only your own heart to make you sad. Dolebury lies between Burrington . and Blackdown where the wilding black game still lingers and whose orange, brown,' green and tawny cap wears. one headdress after another of carven clouds. The great bowl of the abandoned lead factory was brimmed, when I saw it for the fifth time in August, with golden ragwort among which scuttled dozens of black rabbits—one of the most fay of nature's sudden chromatic little tunes. But the extraordinary beauty and diversity of the view soon merges all the little tunes into a choral harmony.
* Silver was extracted from lead by the old prospectors,
First the ground rises to Dinghurst Camp on the other side of the Bristol Road and, like Dolebury, scrabbled over with amorphous old mine-workings. Another dip and rise and Banwell succeeds, a round hill with a wood- cap and another Camp, much smaller now that we arc off the chalk and the limestone. Another dip, another :hill, another dip, a stretch of the flattest water-meads in England, and Brean Down (again with a small earth- work), like a shoveller dibbling among the shallows of a creek, pushes .its huge beak into the Bristol Channel. Nearer brave to the north-west is Worlesbury Camp in the brave old style again because it knots the Severn Estuary with Mendip and the Cotswolds. Beyond it a-hump like the Bass Rock, Steephohne, and then beyond the utmost purple rim of the Cardiff smoke-hills, the semi-circular range of the Welsh mountains bears the horizon on its back and marks the edge of the world.
On either side of the broken prow of Mendip are two great basins, the one on the left cupped by Crook's Peak (with its nick in the sky-line for the handle of the chased vessel) and Wavering Down, and on the right the Somerset flats extending from the sea into Wrington Vale and so east to the great moonstone of Blagdon Reservoir. To the south-west, Exmoor and the Quantocks once more ; to the south-east, the velvet arc of Blackdown. As for the sea, it stretches right away in a narrow strip like the wedding ring of England from the south-west to the cast where it becomes the Severn River.
So vast and crowded is the view that one can understand how the hill-top people who built the great stone walls of Dolebury of unmortared limestone blocks that have tumbled down to their feet in a continuous scree, were so familiar in their mythology with the sky-world. They looked down upon the world as angels might or do or 'did. When the mighty perished, they were removed to a high place where they beheld all the kingdoms of the earth, and the old people seemed to understand that loftiness was not an absolute thing in itself but a superi- "ority conditioned by the extent of what lay visually below. Thus the dead buried in the barrows had but to Amid up and their heads were in heaven. For Dolebury is a mere slope and half of what you see from it I have left out. The great camp matches the great view. Turn from that huge pattern of woodland, hill, sea and water-mead to the wall of stone running eastward along the northern rim of Dolebury and tossing round in that matchless curve to the west and you are satisfied that the view is worthy of the wall from which you up anchor to cruise upon it. II. J. MAssixcuilt.
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