ALL the ebullient modernity of Weston is looked down upon by the immemorially old, from that overhanging vantage-point, Worle Hill, where the ancient camp and fortress of Worlebury, dwelling-place and stronghold of many ancient peoples, shows traces of occupation by a race who flourished some four thousand years since. Worlebury passed through many hands, but the last people who sheltered there died in ruthless battle thirteen centuries ago. Worlebury rises to a height of 357 feet above Weston, and although modern villas here and there impinge upon it, and the spire of Holy Trinity Church and the unlovely backs of houses are a thought too insistent from these grey ramparts of prehistoric times, it is in many ways as remote from the seething crowd beneath as its height would imply. The camp of twenty acres is divided into two unequal parts by a ditch. It is conjectured that the larger portion was the place of refuge, and the smaller the actual fortress, of the race who constructed it. The whole is irregularly enclosed by ramparts of loose pieces of limestone and rocky banks, roughly of live successive ranges, but here and there, in places thought weakest, of as many as seven. On the side facing the sea, where the limestone rocks of Worle Hill go precipitously down, and artificial defence was not required, there are no ramparts. This hilltop was until about 1820 a barren spot, quite innocent of trees, but the plantations made at that time by the Smyth-Pigott of the period have by now resulted in a crown of beautiful woodlands of larch, oak, and other trees. Amid these woods the extraordinary ancient ramparts of loose limestone fragments, the broadest of these defences about a hundred feet across, glimmer greyly, like petrified rivers. The flakes and knobs of stone, broken up and placed here in such immense quantities and with incredible labour, vary in size from about that of an ordinary brick to three times those dimensions, and are as clean and sharp to-day as though but recently quarried. It is not an easy matter to climb over these successive banks and ditches, and it is quite evident that those who at different periods stormed these defences and slew those who occupied them, must have been determined people, little daunted by the losses they must needs have suffered in the advance. The early defenders were men who used the sling for chief weapon of defence, and great numbers of slingers’ platforms—little flat spaces contrived in strategical positions along the sloping sides of the hill—remain, like so many primitive artillery emplacements; while quantities of their ammunition—pebble-stones that are not in the course of nature found on the crests of limestone hills—may be picked up.