The consequence was, each district had to produce for its own tribe all the necessaries of life, however ill-adapted by nature for their due production:  because traffic and barter did not yet exist, and the only form ever assumed by import trade was that of raiding on your neighbours’ territories, and bringing back with you whatever you could lay hands on.  So the people of the chalky Ogbury valley had perforce to grow corn for themselves, whether nature would or nature wouldn’t; and, in order to grow it under such very unfavourable circumstances of soil and climate, they terraced off the entire hillside, by catching the silt as it washed slowly down, and keeping it in place by artificial barriers.

On the top of the down, overlooking this curious vale of prehistoric terraces, rise the twin heights of Ogbury Barrows, familiar landmarks to all the country side around for many miles.  One of them is a tall, circular mound or tumulus surrounded by a deep and well-marked trench:  the other, which stands a little on one side, is long and narrow, shaped exactly like a modern grave, but of comparatively gigantic and colossal proportions.  Even the little children of Ogbury village have noticed its close resemblance of shape and outline to the grassy hillocks in their own churchyard, and whisper to one another when they play upon its summit that a great giant in golden armour lies buried in a stone vault underneath.  But if only they knew the real truth, they would say instead that that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of a short, squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature to the Lapps and Finns, and about as much unlike a giant as human nature could easily manage.  It maybe regarded as a general truth of history that the greatest men don’t by any means always get the biggest monument.

The archaeologists in becoming prints who went with us to the top of Ogbury Barrows sagaciously surmised (with demonstrative parasol) that ‘these mounds must have been made a very long time ago, indeed.’  So in fact they were:  but though they stand now so close together, and look so much like sisters and contemporaries, one is ages older than the other, and was already green and grass-grown with immemorial antiquity when the fresh earth of its neighbour tumulus was first thrown up by its side, above the buried urn of some long-forgotten Celtic warrior.  Let us begin by considering the oldest first, and then pass on to its younger sister.

Ogbury Long Barrow is a very ancient monument indeed.  Not, to be sure, one quarter so ancient as the days of the extremely old master who carved the mammoth on the fragments of his own tusk in the caves of the Dordogne, and concerning whom I have indited a discourse in an earlier portion of this volume:  compared with that very antique personage, our long barrow on Ogbury hill-top may in fact be looked upon as almost modern.  Still, when one isn’t talking in geological language, ten or twenty thousand years