finer view.  The old church down by the railway station was “polished up” in a very painstaking way about fifty years ago, but still retains a Norman nave which seems to have resisted the sandpapering process.  Highclere Park and Castle form a show-place of the first rank; the park being beyond all praise.  The slopes of the Downs and some of their summits are within this beautiful domain of the Earls of Carnarvon.  Ear away from the Castle the park is entirely natural and unconfined, but around the house—­for an actual “castle” is non-existent—­magnificent avenues of rhododendrons make a perfect blaze of colour in the early summer.  The “Jacobean” pile high on the hillside is so only in name, for it was built by the architect of Big Ben.  Once a favourite residence of the Bishops of Winchester, the Castle passed to the Crown in the sixteenth century and then, after purchase by Sir Robert Sawyer, to the Herberts by intermarriage with the last-named knight’s family.  Highclere Church is a new building designed by Sir Gilbert Scott and stands just outside the park.  It replaces an erection of the late seventeenth century which used to stand within a stone’s throw of the castle upon the site of another building of great antiquity.

It is possible to make a way past the woods of Sidown and by the Three Legged Cross Inn to Ashmansworth, where a few years ago a number of wall paintings, one an unique depictment of Pentecost, were discovered on the walls of the little old church that are supposed to have Roman materials built into them.  From here we may continue more or less along the summits of the chalk uplands until the famous Inkpen, or Ingpen, Beacon is reached, in an isolated corner of north-western Berkshire.  But alas! the former glory, on the map, of the Beacon has departed.  Until quite recently it was thought that this, the highest section of the chalk in England, exceeded that mystic 1,000 feet that gives such a glamour to the mere hill and makes of it a local “mountain.”  An added slur was cast upon Inkpen in the handing to the neighbouring Walbury Hill Camp of an additional five feet by these interfering Ordnance surveyors.  The new maps now read—­Walbury Camp 959 feet; Inkpen, 954.  But the loss of 18 yards or so does not seem to have altered the glorious view from the flat-topped Down or to have made its air less sparkling.  The grand wooded vista down the Kennet valley toward Newbury is a sharp contrast to the bare uplands north and south.  Walbury Camp, a fine prehistoric entrenchment, is distinct from Walbury Hill, slightly lower, on which is Combe Gallows, a relic of the past kept in constant repair by a neighbouring farmer as a condition of his land tenure.  Inkpen village is more than a mile away to the north.  Here is a church once old but now smartened up to such an extent that its ancient character is not apparent.  The building, however, has not lost by the change.  The modern appointments are both beautiful and costly.