Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
At Churt I had, upon my left, three hills out upon the common, called
the _Devil's Jumps_. The Unitarians will not believe in the Trinity,
because they cannot account for it. Will they come here to Churt, go and
look at these "Devil's Jumps," and account to me for the placing of
these three hills, in the shape of three rather squat sugar-loaves,
along in a line upon this heath, or the placing of a rock-stone upon the
top of one of them as big as a church tower? For my part, I cannot
account for this placing of these hills. That they should have been
formed by mere chance is hardly to be believed. How could waters rolling
about have formed such hills? How could such hills have bubbled up from
beneath? But, in short, it is all wonderful alike: the stripes of loam
running down through the chalk-hills; the circular parcels of loam in
the midst of chalk-hills; the lines of flint running parallel with each
other horizontally along the chalk-hills; the flints placed in circles
as true as a hair in the chalk-hills; the layers of stone at the bottom
of hills of loam; the chalk first soft, then some miles further on,
becoming chalk-stone; then, after another distance, becoming burr-stone,
as they call it; and at last becoming hard, white stone, fit for any
buildings; the sand-stone at Hindhead becoming harder and harder till it
becomes very nearly iron in Herefordshire, and quite iron in Wales; but,
indeed, they once dug iron out of this very Hindhead. The clouds, coming
and settling upon the hills, sinking down and creeping along, at last
coming out again in springs, and those becoming rivers. Why, it is all
equally wonderful, and as to not believing in this or that, because the
thing cannot be proved by logical deduction, why is any man to believe
in the existence of a God any more than he is to believe in the doctrine
of the Trinity? For my part, I think the "Devil's jumps," as the people
here call them, full as wonderful and no more wonderful than hundreds
and hundreds of other wonderful things. It is a strange taste which our
ancestors had, to ascribe no inconsiderable part of these wonders of
nature to the Devil. Not far from the Devil's jumps is that singular
place which resembles a sugar-loaf inverted, hollowed out, and an
outside rim only left. This is called the "_Devil's Punch Bowl_;" and it
is very well known in Wiltshire, that the forming, or, perhaps, it is
the breaking up, of Stonehenge is ascribed to the Devil, and that the
mark of one of his feet is now said to be seen in one of the stones.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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