s
difficult of access; from its position at the summit of a steep hill;
but it is still protected by a vallum from thirty to forty feet high,
and between the sea and the entrance nearest to it, a length of about
three hundred yards, by a wide exterior ditch with other out-works, as
well as by an inner fosse, faint traces of which only now remain. Hence
to the next and large entrance is a distance of about two thousand feet;
and in this space the interior fosse is still very visible; but the
great abruptness of the hill forbade an outer one.

You, who are not a stranger to the pleasures of botany, would have
shared my delight at finding upon the perpendicular side of this
entrance the beautiful _Caucalis grandiflora_, growing in great
luxuriance upon almost bare chalk, and with its snowy flowers
resembling, as you look down to it, the common species of _Iberis_ of
our gardens. The _Asperula cynanchica_, and other plants peculiar to a
chalky soil, are also found here in plenty, together with the _Eryngium
campestre_, a vegetable of extreme rarity in England, but most abundant
throughout the north of France. _Papaver hybridum_ is likewise common in
the neighboring corn fields round.

Returning from this short botanical digression, let me tell you that the
position considered by some as the southern side of the fortification,
but which I have described as the sinuous part of the western, has its
ramparts of less height. Not so the eastern: on this, as being the most
destitute of all natural defence, (for here there is no hill, and the
eye ranges over an immense level tract, stopped only by distant woods,)
is raised an agger, full forty-five feet in height, and, at a further
distance, is added an outward trench nearly fifty feet wide, though in
its present state not more than three feet deep, and now serving for a
garden.

Such is the external appearance of this camp, which, seen from the sea,
or on the approach either by the west or south, cannot fail to strike
from the boldness of its position; but the effect of the interior is
still more striking; for here, while on one side the horizon is lost in
the immensity of the ocean, on the other two the view is narrowly
circumscribed by the lofty bulwark, at whose feet are almost every where
discernible the remains of the trenches I have already noticed, more
than thirty feet in width. Nor is this the only remarkable circumstance;
for it is still more unaccountable to observe,