Past the south and lower side of Uffington Castle the Ridgeway went fairly straight, with a thorn or two on either side, towards the thick beech clump above Wayland’s Smithy, sometimes a green road, sometimes worn white. The hill-side was divided among charlock and different greens in squares and triangles, and here and there a thatched barn or rick at a corner. Southward I saw the pleasant, dappled scatter of Knighton Bushes over the turf, sometimes considerable woods like those of Ashdown by Alfred’s Castle; in several places the long stretch of turf reared itself up with beautiful but detached hills, like Tower Hill, as high as the main ridge. The hot, misty sun drew out all the odour from uncut grass, clover, cockscombs, yellow bedstraw, ox-eye daisies, and bird’s-foot trefoil, and the light air mixed them. Whatever was visible or hid on the left, the road always commanded the northward valley, the main expanse, and also for the most part the nearer land where the villages lay, close to the foot of the hills on which it was travelling. An enemy might have lain or moved concealed within a very short distance on the south, but never on the north, and it might be conjectured, therefore, that attack was to be feared from that side only, and that the other was friendly country to those most commonly upon the road. The camps of Lowbury, Letcombe, and Uffington were all to northward; Alfred’s Castle alone was on the south, at Ashdown, among the greatest woods now surviving on this part of the Downs. It is hardly possible for unhistorically minded men to think of war on these hills, unless troops are manœuvring over them. Yet the Ridgeway is like nothing so much as a battlement walk of superhuman majesty. The hills between Streatley and Liddington form a curve in the shape of a bow, a doubly curved Cupid’s bow. Following this line, always keeping at the edge of the steep northward slope and surveying the valley, the Ridgeway carries the traveller for thirty miles as if along the battlements of a castle. He begins at Streatley by having the early morning sun of spring over his right shoulder; the full light of midday is on his left as he passes Letcombe Castle; the sun is going down on his right hand as he descends to Totterdown and the pass for the Roman road and modern traffic between the hills.