I judge that you pick up this booklet with much the same ideas on the subject that I had a few months ago. The antiquarians had not helped you or me very much, but had left us with vague ideas and many notes of interrogation.
On early trackways they alternated between a misty appreciation of hill-tracks and ridgeways, and an implied depreciation of all track-makers before the Romans came. To learn the meaning of mounds they did not go beyond the child’s investigation of a drum, cut it open to see; and, if nothing was there, quite failed to profit by such valuable negative evidence. In perhaps one moat in five they found a dwelling, and argued finely on the defensive importance of a ring of water; but as to the other four, with no dwelling, and in unexplained positions, they closed their eyes.