The Circling Year (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1872 edition. Excerpt: ...upon the distant hills. Still retaining our position on Balder's Stone, and turning our faces to the south-west, we see the nearest group of hills at Stretton, lying in a direct line with the base of our mountain, as though forming a link in the same chain. They are not more than thirteen miles away, as the crow flies--to use a familiar phrase--but they stand higher than the Wrekin by several hundred feet, and the broad valley sloping up to them displays its many-shaped and many-tinted meadows, and corn-fields, and coppices, like an inimitable piece of mosaic. The bold, bluff, almost defiant-looking mountain in the centre of the group is the Caer Caradoc, without doubt another of the principal hill fortresses of Caractacus; but I have been compelled reluctantly to give up my long-cherished belief in the tradition that points it out as the last retreat of the brave chieftain. Another tradition, heard or read somewhere, but where I forget, the Caradoc always recalls to my mind: that the Claudia whom St. Paul A SUMMER DAY ON THE WREKTh. speaks of in his epistle to Timothy, is the same British lady, the wife of Pudens the senator, eulogized by Martial in one of his Epigrams, and is also the daughter of Caractacus. The legend states that she was taken to Rome with her parents, where she received the name of Claudius, the conqueror and patron of Caractacus, and that, after her marriage with Pudens, she returned to Britain, and was the first to introduce Christianity to her native island. Separated from the Caradoc by a narrow, longitudinal valley, never more than a mile across, is the Long Mynd, now supposed to be one of the very first-born mountains of the old earth. It, too, is wealthy in the most melancholy of all riches--the traces of...