I see the hills now.  Are they chalk?

Yes, chalk they are:  so we may begin to feel near home now.  See how they range away to the south toward Devizes, and Westbury, and Warminster, a goodly land and large.  At their feet, everywhere, run the rich pastures on which the Wiltshire cheese is made; and here and there, as at Westbury, there is good iron-ore in the greensand, which is being smelted now, as it used to be in the Weald of Surrey and Kent ages since.  I must tell you about that some other time.

But are there Coprolites here?

I believe there are:  I know there are some at Swindon; and I do not see why they should not be found, here and there, all the way along the foot of the downs, from here to Cambridge.

But do these downs go to Cambridge?

Of course they do.  We are now in the great valley which runs right across England from south-west to north-east, from Axminster in Devonshire to Hunstanton in Norfolk, with the chalk always on your right hand, and the oolite hills on your left, till it ends by sinking into the sea, among the fens of Lincolnshire and Norfolk.

But what made that great valley?

I am not learned enough to tell.  Only this I think we can say—­that once on a time these chalk downs on our right reached high over our heads here, and far to the north; and that Madam How pared them away, whether by icebergs, or by sea-waves, or merely by rain, I cannot tell.

Well, those downs do look very like sea-cliffs.

So they do, very like an old shore-line.  Be that as it may, after the chalk was eaten away, Madam How began digging into the soils below the chalk, on which we are now; and because they were mostly soft clays, she cut them out very easily, till she came down, or nearly down, to the harder freestone rocks which run along on our left hand, miles away; and so she scooped out this great vale, which we call here the Vale of White Horse; and further on, the Vale of Aylesbury; and then the Bedford Level; and then the dear ugly old Fens.

Is this the Vale of White Horse?  Oh, I know about it; I have read The
Scouring of the White Horse.

Of course you have; and when you are older you will read a jollier book still,—­Tom Brown’s School Days—­and when we have passed Swindon, we shall see some of the very places described in it, close on our right.

* * * * *

There is the White Horse Hill.

The White Horse Hill?  But where is the horse?  I can see a bit of him:  but he does not look like a horse from here, or indeed from any other place; he is a very old horse indeed, and a thousand years of wind and rain have spoilt his anatomy a good deal on the top of that wild down.

And is that really where Alfred fought the Danes?

As certainly, boy, I believe, as that Waterloo is where the Duke fought Napoleon.  Yes:  you may well stare at it with all your eyes, the noble down.  It is one of the most sacred spots on English soil.