We have seen that the route from the island centre of Stonehenge and Avebury (the plain where the old roads meet) to the Straits of Dover, may be regarded as the original of our communications across the south of the island, from the rich west to the mainland. Such it might have remained to this day, and such it would certainly have remained throughout the period preceding the Roman invasion, and throughout the barbaric centuries which succeeded the withdrawal of the legions, had not a powerful influence (to repeat what was said above) modified the original track and substituted, at least for its earlier portion as far as Farnham, another road. We know that the great way from west to east which should have had its origin in Salisbury Plain, found it as a fact in Winchester. Why was this? Why did the encampment or town upon the Itchen gather round itself a special character, and become the depôt into which would stream the lead of the Mendips, the tin of Cornwall, and the armies of all Britain south of Gloucester and west of the Wiltshire Avon? To sum up all these questions we may ask in one phrase, as we asked at Canterbury: What made Winchester? The answer is again, The Sea: the necessities and the accidents of the crossing of the Channel; and just as Canterbury was made by the peculiarity of the Straits, by the bastion of Kent, confusing and disturbing the rush of the narrow channel, and causing the complexity of meeting tides, so Winchester was made by the peculiar conditions under which the Channel can be passed at what I will call, for the purposes of this essay, the 'Second Crossing': that is, the passage from the jutting promontory of the Cotentin to the southern cape of the Isle of Wight, which stands so boldly out into the sea, and invites adventure from the French shore. The great opportunity of this passage is far less apparent to us moderns than it was to earlier men. With our artificial methods, especially our regular service of steam, we are ignorant or forgetful of the sea, and the true emotions which it arouses have decayed into the ineptitudes with which we are all familiar. We talk of 'commanding' that element in war; there are even some who write as though we of the towns were native to it; there are very few who understand with what divinity it has prompted, allured, and terrified the past of our race, or under what aspect it may prompt, allure, and terrify the men of a future decline. By the map alone no one could discover the character of this Second Crossing. After the Straits of Dover the 'sleeve' of the Channel widens so considerably that no clear alternative passage appears to be provided. From Etaples right away to Ushant one might think a sea so wide was of much the same peril and adventure to any early sailor.