The neolithic ancestor seems to have been particularly fond of these windy hillsides, and has left a great earthwork on them, ten acres in extent. Maiden Bower they call it nowadays—as grotesquely unsuitable a corruption of the original “Maghdune-burh” as may well be imagined. Its wind-swept terraces, distinctly seen from this embankment, scarce give the idea of a boudoir. Neolithic man was fond of these hillsides in a purely negative way. He would have preferred the warmer valleys, only in those remote times they were filled with dense and almost impenetrable forests, and abounded in the fiercest and wildest of wild animals, that came at night and preyed upon his family circle when the camp-fires burnt low. And when those wild creatures were not to be dreaded, there were always hostile tribes prowling in the thickets. So, on all counts, the Downs were safest. Where that remote ancestor built his bee-hive huts and banded together with his fellows to raise a fortified post, others—Britons, Romans, and Saxons—came and added more and taller earthworks, so that the tallest of them are sixteen feet high even now. Shortly after leaving the embankment behind, a sign-post marks a lane to the left, leading to Tilsworth, a dejected village, looking as though agricultural depression had hit it hard. A deserted schoolhouse, by the church, is falling to pieces. Just within the churchyard is a headstone, standing remotely apart from the others. Its isolation invites scrutiny; an attention rewarded by this epitaph:— THIS STONE WAS ERECTED BY SUBSCRIPTION TO THE MEMORY OF A FEMALE UNKNOWN FOUND MURDER’D IN BLACKGROVE WOOD AUG. 15^{th} 1821 Oh pause my friends and drop the silent tear Attend and learn why I was buried here; Perchance some distant earth had hid my clay If I’d outliv’d the sad, the fatal day: To you unknown, my case not understood; From whence I came, or why in Blackgrove Wood. This truth’s too clear; and nearly all that’s known— I there was murder’d, and the villain’s flown. May God, whose piercing eye pursues his flight, Pardon the crime, but bring the deed to light. That the deed was “brought to light” is obvious enough, but that is not what the author of those lines meant. The perpetrator of the deed was never discovered. Blackgrove Wood, a dark mass in a little hollow, is easily seen from the road. In another two miles Hockliffe is reached. XXI