Powis Castle is the best example I can think of in this connection. No one who has seen the hanging gardens of these old walls can fail to appreciate how splendidly effective must have been the appearance of the terraces of Yardley when viewed from the moat below. But in the course of time, as the roads improved, making locomotion easier, the ducal mansion was abandoned in favour of another some miles nearer the coast, and the note of exclusiveness being gone from the shadow of the Castle walls, the terraces ceased to be cultivated; the moat being on a level with the High Street, it became attractive as a site of everyday houses, until in the course of time there sprang up a row, and then a public-house or two, and corporate offices and law-courts that only required a hanging garden at assize times, when smugglers and highwaymen were found guilty of crimes that made such a place desirable--all these backed themselves into the moat until it had to be recognised as a public lane though a _cul-de-sac_ as it is to-day. At the foot of the once beautiful terraces outhouses and stables were built as they were needed, with the happiest irregularity, but joined by a flint wall over which the straggling survivors of the trees and fruits of the days gone by hang skeleton branches. One doorway between two of the stables opens upon a fine stairway made of solid blocks of Portland stone, leading into a gap in the screen-wall of the Castle, the terrace being to right and left, and giving access to the grounds beyond, the appreciative possessor of which writes these lines. _Sic transit gloria_. Another stone stairway serves the same purpose at a different place; but all the other ascents are of brick and probably only date back to the eighteenth century. They lead to some elevated but depressing chicken-runs. I called the attention of our chief local antiquarian to the succession of broad terraces and suggested their decorative origin. He shook his head and assured me that they were ages older than the ducal residence in the High Street. They belonged to the Norman period and were coeval with the Castle walls. When I told him that I was at a loss to know why the Norman builder should first raise a screen-wall forty feet up from a moat, to make it difficult for an enemy to scale, and then go to an amazing amount of trouble to make it easily accessible to quite a large attacking force by a long range of terraces, he smiled the smile of the local antiquarian--a kindly toleration of the absurdities of the tyro--saying,-- “My dear sir, they would not mind such an attack. They could always repel it by throwing stones down from the top--it's ten feet thick there--yes, heavy stones, and melted lead, and boiling water.”