A HEREFORDSHIRE CAMP.
To the Editor.
Within
Entrance
Sir,—At one of the many horse-shoe bends of the Wye it is deflected by the steep slopes of Caplar Hill. The summit of the hill is crowned by one of those earthwork contour enclosures, which is vaguely called a camp. This is one of the largest of the many camps in Herefordshire, being a third of a mile long, and I had noted it in my work on the ancient trackways because I found several tracks to be sighted over it. The generous gift of the owner of Caplar (Colonel Foster) towards a Woolhope Club Fund for the exploration of the earthwork initiated by Mr. G. H. Jack, sent me in haste in December last to get some preliminary impressions. Approach was made to the eastern end through the village of Fownhope, along a part of the ancient highway to Gloucester known as the “Oldway.” To go to the western end a branch road past “Oldstone” (obviously from a vanished mark-stone on a track), would have to be taken. I chose the eastern end because there was marked on the map one of those mounds (now linked up with the earthwork), which I knew to be a sighting mound on a track, and a nucleus which has been the origin of the camp; for J. R. Mortimer in his Yorkshire investigations found all such mounds older than the earthworks which they touched. At the camp entrance I found the sighting mound or tumulus, higher than the earthwork running into its flank, crowned by a group of yew trees and plainly designed to be seen (as it is in winter) from all points round. Nestling close up against it—as is so often the case with ancient tumuli—is a small homestead, its chief feature a fine stone barn. Within the enclosure the winter sun played on the top of the earthern walls, and shot lines of light across the camp, the shadows of the ridges and of the gnarled boles of the old yew trees being yet lit up by reflection from the fleecy clouds. Standing in the top of the camp entrance, which winds round the base of the mound, there opened up such a vista towards Gloucester as can rarely be seen. May Hill, some eight or ten miles away, showed its rounded top, crowned by a group of those Scotch Firs, which, as I mentioned in a previous letter, are the trees of the early track. Men of pre-historic days had stood at the same spot and “made tracks” for the same mark of May Hill.—Alfred Watkins.
Watkins writes about Caplar Camp, Herefordshire. The photos appear in The Old Straight Track as Figs. 87 and 10, and have been scanned from there. They show once again Watkins’s skill as a photographer.