Hence, though for the moment we may appear to wander from our theme, we shall soon see that the matter is not extraneous. When we learn, for instance, that Wiltshire villagers were wont to climb Cley Hill to play a game with balls and sticks within the British earthwork at the summit, and when we hear that this took place on Palm Sunday, we express only mild surprise[459]. When, however, we read of a similar procession of men and maidens, again occurring on Palm Sunday, to the prehistoric camp on the top of St Martin’s Hill (or Martinsell), a steep-sided promontory of the chalk range near Marlborough[460], the subject becomes interesting. In discussing the churchyard yew in a later chapter we shall have occasion to recall the Martinsell anniversary (p. 381 _infra_); in the meantime we cast around for other illustrations. A like ceremony was carried out on Palm Sunday by the villagers of Avebury, Wiltshire, who mounted the famous Silbury Hill, there to eat fig cakes and drink sugar and water. The water was procured from the spring below, known as the Swallow Head. Seeing that Palm Sunday bears elsewhere the nickname of “Fig Sunday,” and that figs were often eaten at this festival, ecclesiastical writers have supposed that the custom is connected with the Gospel story of the cursing of the barren fig tree. (Figs were not always the fruit eaten; in Wessex and the West of England “fig” also means a raisin.) To the folk-lorist, however, this item will be regarded as adventitious--as an accretion which is due to ideas impressed from without. Were the habit of making these pilgrimages to early earthworks confined to one or two localities, or to one particular festival, this superficial explanation might pass unchallenged. But when we encounter instance after instance, reported from many counties, and connected with various anniversaries, then, though the ceremony be often touched with curious little tinges of local colour, we are compelled to go beyond the accidents, and to seek a common underlying principle. This, indeed, does not seem discoverable by any purely historical process. We are driven back to unconscious folk-memory and immemorial tradition--which rarely endeavour to supply a fully efficient cause--to the dim period when, though the practice of raising earthworks was not obsolete, a considerable amount of superstition, and even of ceremonial observance, was already connected with those old monuments. The period referred to roughly covers the first five or six centuries of our era. Behind this transitional stage of superstition lies the prehistoric period, with its own rites and ceremonies, and its own anniversary observances.