It does not, however, follow that our Derbyshire circles date from the commencement of the Bronze Age; it is more probable that some of them are hundreds of years later than Stonehenge, and there is every likelihood that their use was continued through the Roman even to early Christian times, only to be stamped out when their original purpose had been forgotten in their mystic pagan rites. There is evidence that the great circles of the country were centres of native population at the time of the coming of the Romans, for the roads of the invaders were driven straight for them, as the maps of Avebury and Stonehenge in the south, and of Arbor Low and the Bull Ring in our county, clearly indicate. In the Anglo-Saxon language the phrase for astrology was _circol-crœft_, and to-day the horoscope of the fortune-teller is but a survival of our subject. We who look upon these temples of a bye-gone people are still the slaves of Time, and though we measure it with the science of to-day, it is but a question of degree, for the cause and effect is still the same. True, we no longer worship in the Temple of Time, but we can ill afford to sneer at those who knew no better religion than the praise of the heavenly bodies and the admiration of nature’s handiwork as viewed over the distant scene. Nor can we pride ourselves in our science, which for centuries has failed to read the story of these mystic signs, which the rude workers in bronze could yet devise and set up, to— “Observe days, and months, and times, and years.” SWARKESTON BRIDGE By William Smithard The deservedly famous old bridge of Swarkeston situated a few miles south of Derby, where in a beautiful verdant and fertile vale the noble Trent sweeps towards the sea in a series of majestic curves. The river, than which there are but two longer in the country, was of old a convenient rough-and-ready dividing-line across the middle of England; and the frequency with which the phrases “north of Trent” and “south of Trent” were used, shows that the stream was a recognised and familiar boundary to the monarchs and nobles who parcelled out shires and counties for themselves or friends in the Middle Ages. Its general direction is from west to east, but its course is made up of large bends composed of small ones. In the first part of _King Henry IV._, Act III., Scene I., Shakespeare makes Hotspur complain of the windings of the Trent, thus:— “Methinks my moiety, north from Burton here, In quantity equals not one of yours: See how the river comes me cranking in, And cuts me from the best of all my land A huge half-moon, a monstrous cantle out. I’ll have the current in this place damm’d up; And here the smug and silver Trent shall run In a new channel, fair and evenly.”