climbing a hill for a view is that you must
come down again. Leith Hill is better than other hills for the reason
that if you come down the best way, which is eastwards, you can climb up
almost as high again on the other side of the dip and walk nearly a mile
in the wind at the edge of a ridge overlooking half Kent and Sussex, and
then come to the prettiest village of all the Downs. Friday Street is
less a village than a handful of cottages, but Coldharbour has its
church and its inn, the Plough, and its scattered roofs lie on the side
of a valley of green brake and red sand. Coldharbour is almost as Swiss
as Friday Street, and the paint of its inn as bright white as any in the
sun of the Engadine. If Friday Street lacks the cowbells, Coldharbour
would be complete with the grey turbulence of snow-water.

Left and right of Leith Hill are two great camps, both of them firmly
linked in local legend with Caesar and the Danes, and both of them
connected by history with neither. Like the camp on St. George's Hill,
the camps on Anstiebury and Holmbury Hills were ancient British
settlements; places of refuge where the men of the tribe left their
women and children and cattle while they themselves went out with their
stone-tipped arrows to find the men of other tribes. Anstiebury Camp is
the larger, and covers eleven acres or so of what is now deep beechwood.

Anstiebury has an easy and certain derivation. Hean Stige Byrig is early
English for the Bury of the High-way. Mr. H.E. Malden, in the _Surrey
Archaeological Collections_, points out that this may be the Roman Stone
Street, which passes half a mile left of the hill, or it may be the
ancient British road which runs from Coldharbour to Dorking; the latter
he thinks most likely. Certainly a native with proper pride would hardly
refer to the newly engineered road in the distance in preference to the
wonderful highway close at hand. It runs from the hilltop north and
south, cut deep in the yellow sandstone as the ancient Briton liked his
pathways cut. A man twenty feet high could walk invisible between the
banks of that sheltering trackway.

Anstiebury camp came near to harbouring a modern garrison early in the
last century, when the Napoleon scare was at its wildest heights, and
good citizens went to bed praying that the next day "Boney" might not be
thundering at the town gates; it was actually proposed that the old
British Camp should be used to shelter the women and childr