The views here are full of quiet beauty; the river winding along between its green walls of rushes, set with white and purple comfrey and yellow loosestrife, flowing into the darkness of the trees, and then again coming out by meadows, across which rises the Priory Church of Christchurch, standing out clear and sharp against the dark mass of Hengistbury Head. [Illustration: The Avon at Winkton.] CHAPTER XIII. CHRISTCHURCH. [Illustration: The Priory Church from the Castle Keep.] I have determined to give a chapter to Christchurch, not because it contains more than many another town, but because it is a fair representative of the generality of small English boroughs. There is not a town in England, dating from even the Middle Ages, which is not full of interest peculiarly its own, and which does not possess memorials of the past which no other place can show. It has been proposed, by a no mean authority, to teach history by paintings and cartoons. But history is already painted for us on our city walls, and written for us upon our gates and crumbling castles. Our towns are in themselves the best texts upon history. For what we have seen with our eyes, and touched with our hands, leaves a more vivid and more lasting impression than the closest study of libraries of histories. Further, the picture of a mediæval town, as given in its own archives, with its own legislation, its peculiar manufacture, or import, forms, to some extent, the true social picture of the times. Its history reflects—and not faintly—the history of the day. Christchurch was never a town of sufficient importance to show all this in its municipal records. Yet, too, we shall see that they in another way are, like the town itself, full of interest. From a modern point of view there is nothing to be seen beyond three or four straggling streets and its manufactory of fusee watch-chains—the only one in England. All its interest and associations lie with the past. The country round it, too, is equally bound up with that same past. To the north rises St. Catherine’s Hill, which we saw from the valley of the Avon, with its oval and square camps, and rampart and double vallum, crested with the mounds of its Roman watch-towers. The river Stour winds along between rows of barrows. Hengistbury Head is still fortified by its vast earthworks, and entrenched by deep ditches from the Avon to the sea.[156] Here the Britons saw the first swarm of fugitive Belgæ land and spread themselves along the rich valleys of Dorsetshire.[157] Here, centuries afterwards, the West-Saxons watched the raven—standard of the Danes scouring down the Channel, and knew their course along the coast, at night, by the blaze of burning villages, and, in the day, by the black trail of smoke.[158]