BY WILLIAM MORLEY EGGLESTONE When Julius Cæsar conquered Britain, he found the island peopled by Celts--a branch of the great family of nations called the Aryan, or Indo-European, which spread over the world from Central Asia. The Western branches, which rolled in successive waves over Europe, included the Celts, who, according to the Greek traveller Pytheas, were in the fourth century before the Christian era quite at home in Britain, for he there saw growing in the fields corn which the farmers took in sheaves to the barns, in which were threshing-floors. In Weardale, situated in the western and mountainous part of the county of Durham, and surrounded by brown and heath-clad fells, the ancient Briton lived in the limestone caves, and hunted in the oaken forests. In the Wear Valley, near Hamsterley, and about seven miles east of Stanhope, there is a remarkable relic of the ancient Britons. This ancient fortification--like many other works constructed by the Britons of old, such as the Dene Holes of Essex and the Cliff Castles--has its name, and is called The Castles. The treasure of Heatheryburn Cave, at Stanhope, consisted of bone knives and pins, boar tusks, bronze and jet ornaments, spearheads and bronze celts, with prehistoric human skulls, showing considerable activity of the natives who manufactured and formed the various rude implements. Apart from these landmarks, there have come down to us in names of places the Celtic roots the _ray_ and the _tay_, which we find in Lang Tay, the name of a small but long tributary stream of water in Burnhope; and in Reahope, a tributary hope to Stanhope, and which empties its waters into Stanhope Burn, a tributary of the River Wear. The Roman power seems to have been extended to Weardale, for the two Roman altars found at Bolihope and Eastgate, and the denarii found at Westgate, prove that this lead-mining dale was well known to those ruling and wall-building people. Soon after the Romans left, the Anglo-Saxons--including the Jutes, the Saxons, and the English--established themselves along the eastern coast of Britain, and these tribes of the Teutonic family took a firm grasp of the land, and planted the roots of the English nation.