Page:The Strand magazine - No 101 (May 1899).djvu/3  From
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proofread, but needs to be validated.  scattered cottages of the
peasants were so dwarfed by the huge evidences of prehistoric
life, that the present appeared to be a dream and the past to be
the obtrusive and masterful reality. The road wound through the
valleys, formed by a succession of grassy hills, and the summit
of each was cut and carved into the most elaborate
fortifications, some circular, and some square, but all on a
scale which has defied the winds and the rains of many
centuries. Some call them Roman and some British, but their true
origin and the reasons for this particular tract of country
being so interlaced with entrenchments have never been finally
made clear. Here and there on the long, smooth, olive-coloured
slopes there rose small, rounded barrows or tumuli. Beneath them
lie the cremated ashes of the race which cut so deeply into the
hills, but their graves tell us nothing s