Because of this marshiness of the lower grounds, the roads by which people travelled went as much as possible along the upper, the harder and drier, ground, sometimes following a line near the top of the downs. The tracks or byways from the woodland and valley villages rose up out of the lowland as quickly as the ground would allow and went up to join the older roads along the downs. But, in spite of all that, you must realise that the rivers were really the great means of communication. They were the chief roads and highways; and the proof of that is that it is always low down, by a river, that all the old towns and the big church establishments and buildings were made. There are Canterbury, London, Winchester, Oxford, Paris, Rouen and very many more that you will think of. Not a river of any size that did not have a town springing up on its banks, and not a town of any size springing up anywhere except on a river's bank. {98} And the way in which the English and other Gothic people formed their homes and lived their lives appears to have been very different from the way of life of the older Celts. We have seen that the Anglo-Saxons, when they came to England, established themselves in the river valleys and in the woodland country; but there is evidence that those earliest inhabitants of whom we know anything, the Celts, who were here before the Romans, lived more on the upper lands, on the Downs. This is shown by the relics which the plough and the spade discover for us, on these upper levels, and also by those extraordinary large stone rings of which the most famous is that at Stonehenge, although it is certain that only a few hundred years ago the stones at Avebury near Marlborough must have encircled a very much larger area. Most of the Avebury stones have been broken up now by the farmers to make roads and houses. [Sidenote: Lines of travel] The great stone circles had to do with the religion of which the Druids were the priests, and you should note that this Avebury, near Marlborough, is a very central spot, in England. It is on high ground, and we know that many tracks or roadways led from it as a centre, going out like spokes of a wheel. Also you may notice that many of the rivers radiate out from that central high ground and find their way thence in different directions to the sea. Probably that part of the country was looked on as particularly sacred because it was so central. Now for people coming to England from the Continent of Europe, the easiest way to come, because it was the shortest sea-passage, would be across the Channel at, or near, Dover. Thence, if they wanted to get into the heart of England, they would be prevented from going northward by the Thames. They could not cross the Thames on foot or on horse till they came to London, where the Romans made their {99} Watling Street, as it was called, across the river and thence up to Chester.