It was a little
sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views. They
would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk round it. Then they would go in
the afternoon through the pleasant west country where the Celts had
prevailed against the old folk of the Stonehenge temple and the Romans
against the Celts and the Saxons against the Romanized Britons and the
Danes against the Saxons, a war-scarred landscape, abounding in dykes
and entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace, to
Glastonbury to see what there was to see of a marsh village the Celts
had made for themselves three or four hundred years before the
Romans came. And at Glastonbury also there were the ruins of a great
Benedictine church and abbey that had once rivalled Salisbury. Thence
they would go on to Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine
and sleep. Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the story of
Europe right up to Reformation times.
"That will be a good day for us," said Sir Richmond. "It will be like
turning over the pages of the history of our family, to and fro. There
will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in it, but there will be
something from almost every chapter that comes after Stonehenge. Rome
will be poorly represented, but that may come the day after at Bath.
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