Page 123 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

. ecap at a time before tne waters nau uiukcu uhuu^u
the English Channel and the North Sea. But in a dim unformu­
lated way they look upon the farmers of the south and west as
newcomers, even though these have been in Britain for a dozen

centuries now.
They look upon the settled farmers with a mixture of envy

and contempt. They well realize that these “foreigners,” with
their substantially built villages and embanked camps and
corrals on the sand and chalk uplands of the soft south, enjoy

a higher standard of comfort than they themselves do. But, while
they will occasionally raise a crop, they feel no urge to tie them­

selves to the rhythm of seedtime and harvest, or to leave their
fish-stocked rivers and coasts, and their game-stocked forests,
for the bare Downs where alone cultivation is possible. The “for­

eigners”—and despite centuries of occupation they are still at
least so foreign that they speak a different language—in truth

only hold a very small part of Britain. On the Downs and the
Cotswolds of the south their causewayed camps lie thick, and
they have colonized, too, the northeastern chalklands of York­

shire and Lincolnshire. And along the estuaries of the west coast,
all the way to the north of Scotland, the seagoing settlers and

traders from Ireland (who ultimately have come from the Medi­
terranean) are coming in increasing numbers, and are still build­
ing new passage-graves of immense stones alongside the old. But

all these are fringe areas; the heart of the country, from the
great valleys of the Thames and Severn in the south to the high­

lands and islands of Scotland to the north, is the domain of the
“natives.”
The youngsters whom we have seen around the Langdale

chipping-floors will have traveled much of England before ever
they reach manhood. They wander much with their tribe,

which, as befits a race of hunters, ranges over a wide, though
strictly defined, area of northern England. They rarely stay more
than a couple of months at any one of the recognized camping

sites, and often move every day or so, following their grazing
sheep and cattle, or the slow seasonal movements of the deer and

t e wild cattle. They grow adept in breaking camp, packing the
skins and poles of the tents on the ox sledges and solid-wheeled

H