The position occupied by the Federals was by no means ill-adapted for defence.  The country round Winchester, and indeed throughout the Valley of the Shenandoah, resembles in many of its features an English landscape.  Low ridges, covered with open woods of oak and pine, overlook green pastures and scattered copses; and the absence of hedgerows and cottages gives a park-like aspect to the broad acres of rich blue grass.  But the deep lanes and hollow roads of England find here no counterpart.  The tracks are rough and rude, and even the pikes, as the main thoroughfares are generally called, are flush with the fields on either hand.  The traffic has not yet worn them to a lower level, and Virginia road-making despises such refinements as cuttings or embankments.  The highways, even the Valley pike itself, the great road which is inseparably linked with the fame of Stonewall Jackson and his brigade, are mere ribbons of metal laid on swell and swale.  Fences of the rudest description, zigzags of wooden rails, or walls of loose stone, are the only boundaries, and the land is parcelled out in more generous fashion than in an older and more crowded country.  More desirable ground for military operations it would be difficult to find.  There are few obstacles to the movement of cavalry and artillery, while the woods and undulations, giving ample cover, afford admirable opportunities for skilful manoeuvre.  In the spring, however, the condition of the soil would be a drawback.  At the date of the battle part of the country round Kernstown was under plough, and the whole was saturated with moisture.  Horses sank fetlock-deep in the heavy meadows, and the rough roads, hardly seen for mud, made marching difficult.

The Federal front extended on both sides of the Valley turnpike.  To the east was a broad expanse of rolling grassland, stretching away to the horizon; to the west a low knoll, crowned by a few trees, which goes by the name of Pritchard’s Hill.  Further north was a ridge, covered with brown woods, behind which lies Winchester.  This ridge, nowhere more than 100 feet in height, runs somewhat obliquely to the road in a south-westerly direction, and passing within a mile and a half of Pritchard’s Hill, sinks into the plain three miles south-west of Kernstown.  Some distance beyond this ridge, and separated from it by the narrow valley of the Opequon, rise the towering bluffs of the North Mountain, the western boundary of the Valley, sombre with forest from base to brow.

On leaving Winchester, Williams’ division had struck due east, passing through the village of Berryville, and making for Snicker’s Gap in the Blue Ridge.  The Berryville road had thus become of importance to the garrison of Winchester, for it was from that direction, if they should become necessary, that reinforcements would arrive.  General Kimball, commanding in Shields’ absence the division which confronted Ashby, had therefore posted the larger portion of