Earlier civil conflicts, that between Edward II and his barons, and that holier war of liberty, won though lost, by Simon de Montfort against his king and prince, have left graphic memories in Herefordshire. But even these strifes seem recent beside the battle-marks of Offa the Saxon, who built an earthen dyke, still in fairly good preservation, from the Severn to the Wye, to keep the Welshmen back; and beside those thick-set British camps and Roman camps that testify to the stubborn stand of Caractacus and his Silures against the all-conquering legions. We were on a peaceful pilgrimage and could well dispense with visiting Coxwall Knoll, close above Brampton-Bryan, where Caractacus met his crushing defeat, and Sutton Walla, some five miles to the north of Hereford, where Offa, King of the Mercians, betrayed to assassination his guest, King Ethelbert of the East Angles; but we ought to have sought out Holm Lacy, for the sake of the Sir Scudamour of Spenser's "Faery Queene," and to have visited Hope End, near Ledbury, in loving homage to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And so we might, had it not been for the innate depravity of man as exemplified in the dourest driver that ever handled reins. His one aim throughout that trip was not to go anywhere we wished. He would sometimes seem to hesitate at a parting of the ways, but it was only to find out which road was our desire, when as deaf and dumb to all our protests as if he knew only the Silurian tongue, as impervious to parasol pokes as if he were cased in Roman mail, he would take the other. The only comfort that came to our exasperated souls was the reflection that at sundown we could dismiss Sir Stiffback with his ill-earned shillings and never see his iron phiz again, whereas the unfortunate women of his household, the possible wife, sister, daughter, would have to put up with the unflinching obduracy of that cross-grained disposition until he went the way of Roger de Mortimer. But not even this cromlech of a coachman, though with the worst intentions, could prevent our enjoying the pastoral charm of the quiet land through which we drove, for this county, as Fuller wrote, "doth share as deep as any in the alphabet of our English commodities, though exceeding in the W for wood, wheat, wool, and water." As for wood, we saw in Harewood Park, by which our Clod of Wayward Marl inadvertently drove us, chestnuts and beeches whose height and girth would do credit to California; in point of wheat the county is said to be so fertile that, for all the wealth of cattle, the people have not time to make their own butter and cheese; the wool was reckoned in Fuller's time the finest of all England; and the salmon-loved Wye, which rises, like the Severn, on the huge Plinlymmon mountain, flows with many picturesque turns and "crankling winds" across the county, receiving the Lug, on which Leominster is situate, and further down, the Monnow, which forms the Monmouth boundary.