The doctor had not realized before the boldness and liveliness of his
companion's mind. Sir Richmond insisted that the climate must have been
moister and milder in those days; he covered all the downlands with
woods, as Savernake was still covered; beneath the trees he restored a
thicker, richer soil. These people must have done an enormous lot with
wood. This use of stones here was a freak. It was the very strangeness
of stones here that had made them into sacred things. One thought too
much of the stones of the Stone Age. Who would carve these lumps of
quartzite when one could carve good oak? Or beech--a most carvable wood.
Especially when one's sharpest chisel was a flint. "It's wood we ought
to look for," said Sir Richmond. "Wood and fibre." He declared that
these people had their tools of wood, their homes of wood, their gods
and perhaps their records of wood. "A peat bog here, even a few feet of
clay, might have pickled some precious memoranda.... No such luck....
Now in Glastonbury marshes one found the life of the early iron
age--half way to our own times--quite beautifully pickled."
Though they wrestled mightily with the problem, neither Sir Richmond nor
the doctor could throw a gleam of light upon the riddle why the ditch
was inside and not outside the great wall.
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