Chalk, like sand, is dry, and the roads can be traversed very soon after rain. They are not very good, however; often they are only mended with flints, which occur in the chalk and are therefore easily obtainable, and the sharp fragments play sad havoc with bicycle tyres. The bye roads and lanes are often narrow, winding, and worn deep especially at the foot of the hills, so that the banks get a fair amount of moisture and carry a dense vegetation. Among the profusion of flowers you can find scabious, the bedstraws, vetches, ragwort, {111} figwort, and many a plant rare in other places, like the wild orchids; while the cornfields are often yellow with charlock. In the hedgerows are hazels, guelder roses, maples, dogwood, all intwined with long trails of bryony and traveller's joy. In the autumn the traveller's joy produces the long, hairy tufts that have earned for it the name of old man's beard, while the guelder roses bear clusters of red berries. The great variety of flowers attracts a corresponding variety of butterflies, moths and other insects; there are also numbers of birds and rabbits--indeed a chalk country teems with life in spite of the bare look of the Downs. The roads running at the foot of the chalk Downs and connecting the villages, and farmhouses built there for the good water supply, are particularly rich in plants because they sometimes cut into the chalk and sometimes into the neighbouring clay, sand or rock. Now and then a spring bursts out and a little stream takes its rise: if you follow it you will generally find watercress cultivated somewhere. Besides the beech trees you also find ash, sycamore, maples, and, in the church yards, some venerable yews. Usually the chalk districts were inhabited very early: they are dry and healthy, the land can be cultivated and the heights command extensive views over the country, so that approaching enemies could easily be seen. On the chalk downs and plains are found many remains of tribes that lived there in the remote ages of the past, whose very names are now lost. Strange weapons and ornaments are sometimes dug up in the camps where they lived and worked; the barrows can be seen in which they were buried, and the temples in which they worshipped; Stonehenge itself, the best known of all these, lies on the chalk. {112} Several of the camps still keep the name the ancient Britons gave them--the _Mai-dun_, the encampment on the hill, changed in the course of years to Maiden, as in Maiden Hill, near Dorchester, in Dorset, Maiden Bower, near Dunstable, and so on. Some of their roads are still in use to this day, the Icknield Way (the way of the Iceni, a Belgic tribe), the Pilgrim's Way of the southern counties and others. Even the present villages go back to very ancient times, and the churches are often seven or eight hundred years old.