By courtesy of the owner we pass in front of the garden, gay with its flowers, and full of the sense and sweetness of an English country house. We can hardly gaze at the camp we have come to see, so fair and beautiful is the vision outstretched before us of Bassenthwaite laid in gleaming whiteness beneath the dark hills of Wythop and the purple vastness of Skiddaw, so exquisite the shadowy foldings of the blue hills that take the eye far up beyond the gates of Borrodale to Gimmer Crag, to Great-End and far Sea-fell. But when we look at the camp we have come to see we find ourselves standing on a high plateau, sheltered on north and east and west by rising ground. The site of the camp is rectangular, eighty-three feet by thirty-one; isolated by a trench with regular scarp and counter-scarp. This trench is twelve feet broad at the bottom, twenty feet at the top; the scarp and counter-scarp are each nine feet, and the depth is five feet. The work, to all appearance, is freshly done, and but for the fact that no pottery has been revealed, might well be work of Roman engineers. As we wonder at the quaint oblong island of green carved in {103} the hill side, surrounded by its dry moat, we listen to what the sages say and archaeologists guess about its origin and intent. 'The remains of a mediaeval pleasaunce,' says one antiquarian. 'Not a bit of it,' says another, 'this was no sheet of water for ornament, with an island in its midst, this was a Roman sanitary camp. Hither sick and sorry came the poor fellows, whom the frosts of Cumberland had pinched, or the dews of Cumberland had rheumatised, or the malaria of the Derwent Vale had febrified, or the swords and clubs of the stubborn British had wounded, and here girt round by friendly fence of water, sheltered from the wind, uplifted in this quiet pastoral scene, they built their rough wattle hospital, and prayed to the goddess of health.' 'No, no,' says a third antiquarian, no authority he, and therefore likeliest to be right. 'This was a battle holme. Here in the olden time men met for holm-gauge or wager of battle; on that oval sward was decided, in the sight of the assembled multitude, the feud of families or the strife of tribes.' We can, as we gaze, conjure up the whole scene, and hear the crash of battle hammer, and see the flame of the circling brand; but the {104} peace of the present subdues the passion of the past, and the sound of the quiet grass-cropping hard by of the unfearful sheep, the song of the thrush from the neighbour sycamore recalls us to such pastoral tranquillity as ill assorts with the stormy drama 'Of old far-off unhappy things And battles long ago.'