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circumference. They commenced by the side of the Eagle Tower, where was a posterngate, and rejoined the castle near the Queen's Gate. They were strengthened at intervals by semicircular towers, and enclosed by a moat. Considerable portions of these still remain, and are conspicuous on the side facing the sea, but elsewhere they are often incorporated into houses, or enclosed in private property, so that they do not generally form a marked feature in views of the town.

The public buildings of Carnarvon are not remarkable, and beyond the castle and the ruins of Segontium there is little to detain the traveller, unless he be interested in the slate trade, which is carried on busily at Carnarvon, that being the place of export for the Nantle quarries. These are worked in a bed of slate similar to that at Bethesda and Llanberis, but are situated further to the west. There is, however, a hill rising just above the town, which is a favourite place of resort with the inhabitants, and is worth ascending. Twt Hill, as it is called, is only of slight elevation, being merely a bold, rocky knoll at the corner of the plateau on the slopes of which Carnarvon is built, but it commands a fine view over the opening of the Straits and the opposite coast of Anglesea, over the town, the castle, and the wooded dell of the Seiont, and over the great chain of the Carnarvonshire mountains, from the Carnedds to far away in the Lleyn peninsula.

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The Malvern Hills, their Physical Structure and Geological History-British Camp on the Herefordshire Beacon and Midsummer Hill- The Chace of Malvern in Olden Time-Forest Laws-Priory Church at Great Malvern-Piers the Ploughman-The Malverns-Great Malvern-The Worcester Beacon-Eastnor Park-Water and Climate of the Malverns.

OR those who love contrasts in scenery there are few more striking in England than those presented by the Malvern Hills, especially on their eastern side. As a rule, on approaching an important chain of hills the lowlands begin to lift themselves into preliminary undulations, as it were, in humble rivalry of their grander neighbours. Here, however, the highest hills of the Malvern range rise above the valley plain of the Severn like a surging wave of the sea above a flat and sandy shore. It would hardly be possible to imagine contrast more complete. After the Severn has passed through its "iron gate" in the narrows of Coalbrook Dale, its valley broadens out into a plain, which forms no inconsiderable part of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire. On the one hand this is bounded by a steep escarpment, the edge of the shelving plateau forming the English Midlands, which sweeps along from the Clent and the Licky Hills to the limestone cliffs of the Cotteswolds; on the other, the Malvern

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MISERERE IN THE ABBEY CHURCH.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE MALVERN HILLS.

113

Hills, between the minor ridges of the Abberley Hills on the north and May Hill on the south, form a bolder and yet more definite limit. True, the Severn valley is not a monotonous plain, such as those through which the greater rivers of Europe flow during the last stage of their course. It is dimpled by a thousand minor undulations; it rises here and there into small hills, and is only a flat in the immediate vicinity of the river; still these, though sufficient to redeem it from monotony, do not deprive it of its true character as a valley plain, and accentuate the contrast which is presented by the western hills. Differing, then, in every respect-in the hardness of their rock, in the steepness of their slope, in the boldness of their outline, in the suddenness of their rise-the Malvern Hills produce an impression of size and elevation greater than they actually possess. They are more imposing than many summits far surpassing them in magnitude, so that, as it has been well expressed by Mrs. Browning, over all this Severn plain

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"Malvern Hills, for mountains counted,
Not unduly, form a row."

Nothing can be simpler than their physical
structure. We have no group of wide-spread
summits with intricate systems of valleys, but

a mere ridge, running nearly north and south, a linear series of smooth yet steep summits. They can scarcely be said to possess valleys-they hardly afford glens. Though from north to south the chain has a length of about eight miles, its breadth from east to west is about half a mile. In the Malvern Hills are no lofty precipices,

THE WYCHE.

no splintered peaks; they consist of little more than slopes of turf and furze, steep often as the roof of a house, through which here and there the rock projects in low crags or in short ridges. In the days of their youth they may have uplifted bare pinnacles against the storm and the frost, but those days were long ago, and time has prevailed, so far at least as to destroy whatever is capable of destruction. It has fared with the Malverns as with the ruins of some ancient castle: the battlements fall, the tracery crumbles, perhaps even the ashlar work is destroyed; but then the elements have done their worst: the core of rough concrete remains, which Nature, when her rage is baffled, clothes, as if in repentant tenderness, with soft herbage and trailing plants.

The Malvern Hills are indeed very old-one of the oldest mountain chains in Europe. Compared with them the Alps and the Pyrenees are boyish upstarts, and even Snowdon and Ben Nevis are among their juniors. In the first place, they are composed of perhaps

*

the oldest rocks in the British Isles. Formerly, when the facts of rock structure were imperfectly understood, geologists supposed them to be of igneous origin-that is, composed of rock which was once in a molten condition-and called this syenite. Their true nature was proved by Dr. H. B. Holl; and since the publication of his paper, some twenty years since, no competent observer has doubted that, at any rate, the greatest portion of the mass belongs to the group of rocks termed metamorphic-namely, to those which, having been once deposited by the action of water, as sand, mud, &c., have subsequently been greatly altered in structure by heat, pressure, and other agents of change. It is, of course, difficult to assign a date to rocks of this character, but we may venture to say that these in the Malverns are more ancient than the oldest in which traces of life have at present been discovered in Britain, and probably can only find their coëvals among a few outcropping ridges in Salop, or the very oldest rocks of Wales, or those rocks of Northwest Scotland which may be seen in the outer Hebrides and at the base of the mountains of Sutherland and Ross.

But more than this, the Malvern Hills are ancient as hills. A mountain chain evidently may be formed of very old rocks, but yet may have been elevated at a comparatively modern epoch. This (though it is not universally admitted) is probably the case with parts of the Alps. But as regards the Malvern Hills we can claim for them a very great antiquity. The rocks which are in contact with the greater part of their western flank, are at the base of the series called by the Geological Survey, Upper Silurian. Now, in the lowest of these we find shells, corals, and other fossils mingled with fragments from the rocks of the Malvern Hills. These fragments are in precisely the same mineral condition as the parent rock; from this, then, it is evident that the agents which have altered the Malvern strata had done their work at this time; and the angular form of these fragments shows that they were broken off from crags or slopes overhanging the sea, and quietly sank beneath the zone disturbed by the action of waves. Yet even now, above the spot where these fragments are found, the hills rise so steeply that obviously no very marked alteration in their outline has taken place since the beginning of the Upper Silurian epoch. At that date, then, the Malvern Hills presented a precipitous coast-line to a sea which rolled over what is now Herefordshire. How far they extended eastward, whether they were the margin of a continent or only the edge of an island, we do not know; this limit cannot be fixed till a later date, when the red sandstones of Central England were formed in the beginning of what is called the Secondary or Mesozoic period. By that time, at any rate, the present eastern boundary of the range was roughly defined, and the steepness of the slopes on both faces renders it almost certain that since this later epoch no very great change can have taken place in the Malvern Hills. They may have been depressed and uplifted, have been buried beneath sediment, and again exhumed, but no large amount can have been removed from either their summits or their flanks since the building of the English Midlands began.

Thus they stand as one of Nature's frontier lines: an outwork of the mountain region of Wales, dividing an upland from a lowland district, dividing two counties and two bishoprics, as well as two totally different classes of scenery. After the English invasion they parted * Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, Vol. XXI., p. 72.

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the Hwiccas from the Magesætas; before the Roman, tribe from tribe of the British races. At their feet, doubtless, the tide of invading races in epochs lost to history has more than once been checked; and on their summits some antiquaries have fancied that the troops. of Caractacus made their last stand against the legions of Rome. This, however, is more than doubtful; but that the natural advantages of the Malvern Hills have been utilised for purposes of defence is evidenced by some of the most remarkable remains of ancient fortifications which can be found in Britain.

The principal summit of the chain rises directly above the town of Great Malvern, and is called the Worcester Beacon; and beyond this, on the north, there is only one important hill. The Beacon, which does not greatly overtop the North Hill, rises to a height of 1,395 feet above the sea. To the south of it succeeds a line of rather lower summits; this, at a point called the Wyche, where a road is carried across the chain through an artificial cutting, sinks down to about 900 feet above the sea. South of this, for about two miles, the line of hills is continued, and then another gap is reached, at a lower level than the Wyche, traversed also by the main road from Hereford to Worcester. Here what may be called the northern group of hills terminates and the southern begins: begins, indeed, with its loftiest and most remarkable summit, the Herefordshire Beacon; this rises to a height of 1,156 feet above the sea, and beyond it, the chain extends for rather more than a mile to Midsummer Hill, which guards another gap, beyond which the range is indeed continued for some distance, but becomes less conspicuous, owing to the more elevated ground which borders it on the west.

These two gaps have obviously been for all time the gateways in this natural wall of defence. Through them an army with even the humblest approach to a baggage train must advance into the border-land of this portion of Herefordshire; through them, when laden with spoil or encumbered with captive slaves or cattle, it must retreat. We find, then, these two gaps, or hill-fortresses, guarded by two "camps" of no ordinary strength. Their remains are in an unusually good state of preservation; for about them the slopes are too steep, the soil is too thin to allow the plough to pass, or even to be a temptation to the most thrifty husbandmen; for if the poor earth could be brought under the spade, the elevated situation would forbid the hardiest crops to render a due return for the labour. Thus the trenches excavated in the solid rock and the scarped banks remain little altered since the days of their last defenders, and the short turf which clothes the upper part of the hill has been undisturbed for tens of centuries. If there are any who suppose that our British forefathers were mere barbarians-brave, indeed, but hardly more civilised than the Zulus of the present day-they need only spend a few hours in examining these fortresses, and they will find that, though doubtless the Britons were in many respects very inferior to their Roman invaders, they could construct defensive works which exhibit no mean powers of contrivance. Even in the present day a body of determined men could only be dislodged from the lines of the Herefordshire Beacon by a well-directed artillery fire. In the days of bows and arrows-we might say until the days of explosive missilesit must have been impregnable.

This is hardly the place to dwell upon the details of the defensive works, and some of them could not be clearly described without a very elaborate ground-plan; but their general

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