Country Li f e AT the moment of writing this I am
staying in a Border Country, in the dale of the Mon Honddu. Here Wales and England meet. The people for the most part look neither quite Welsh nor quite Saxon (for there is such a thing as a pure Saxon type), but just an odd mixture of both ; though I have noticed an occasional predominant Celtic type. From where do we invent our pictures of the " Ancient Britons " ? I suppose it is from a dark West Country type, short in stature, wide or squat in face, with high cheek-bones, such as one sees often enough in the West of England. Every tenth man you meet off the town tracks has a strangely primitive shaggy look about him. " Two thousand years ago," you say to yourself, shut your eyes and see rolling forests and hear the howling of wolves. These dark Celtic-looking people are to be seen in all the English Western dales. But the Yorkshire type is different. The Celtic people there are taller and the face approaches that of the Highland Scottish. The other type is Danish, for there is little Saxon element North of the Trent. Neither Angle, Saxon, nor Dane exterminated the " Ancient Britons " as the Victorian history books have taught us, but drove them into the mountain country where they did not frequently follow them, sticking rather to the flat lands and rolling lands which had rich soil and could grow plenty of grain. Wales, of course, they left entirely alone ; and so the real Welsh are quite a different race of people today.
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