The most tragic element of all in human indiscretion is the mindless routine which has deadened the brain of ordinary men. There is in Lancashire, for example, a charming valley where six or seven old bridges make a few minutes’ walk a very long pilgrimage through the history of primitive conventions. Wycollar the valley is called, and antiquaries and pontists ought to go there at once, but not in motor-cars that devour topography as well as miles. One bridge is exceedingly low in the scale of thought and skill; indeed, no prehistoric tool or weapon stands below it. Even the Adam of Evolution, if he ever lived in rock-strewn places, had common sense enough probably to choose a flat stone and to lay it across a deep rivulet, so as to save his children from danger. Such is the most primeval of the Wycollar bridges: three schoolboys could make a smaller one between two April showers. For the stone is not a huge slab ten feet long by four wide, such as we find not far from Fernworthy Bridge, Dartmoor; nor is it like the single slab over the Walla Brook on Dartmoor. It is a long lintel-stone, and in eight or nine strides a little girl would cross it easily.[15] If the stone were new, and also alone in the valley, no one would think more of it than of a plank used as a temporary bridge; but the stone is very old, and lintel-bridges are ancient customs in the valley of Wycollar. If Nature once in a century allowed bridges to tell their tales, I should expect two of the Wycollar historians to trace their lineage through a great many ancestors until at last they came to a time when the first nomads hacked their way with flint axes through the undergrowth of Lancashire forests, and cursed in primitive words or sounds at the virile brambles whose thorns were sharper than pointed flints.