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X. Report on the excavation of the Earthwork known as
Ambresbury Banks, Epping Forest.
By Major-General A. Pitt-Rivers, F.E.S., President of the
Anthropological Institute.
[Read at the Chelmsford Meeting of the Club, August 13th, and at the
York Meeting of the British Association, September 5th, 1881.]
Plates III., IV., and V.
Epping Forest contains two camps about two miles apart,
concerning which there are some local traditions. These
camps owe their preservation to the fact of this region
having been always forest and not cultivated ground; and
this is a point worth noting on the part of those who are
inclined to lay stress on the value of tradition as evidence of
time and place. It is certain that neither Caesar nor Boadicea,
nor any of the heroes and heroines of olden times, to whom
these things are ascribed, had any special eye for locating
themselves in places which might not in after years be
destroyed by the plough; yet tradition concerning these
people hangs naturally about such places as remain to us
from ancient times, rather than about those innumerable
spots in our long and highly cultivated country in which
ancient monuments have been destroyed by agriculture.
If anyone desires by practical experience to test the value
of transmitted evidence, let him in the first place sit down,
as I have done, to write a paper on Ambresbury Banks from
materials derived almost exclusively from the notes of other
gentlemen whose knowledge of the matter is greater than his
own, and who having diligently watched the excavations
made there, whilst he was otherwise engaged in London or
elsewhere, have been good enough to supply him with all he
has to base his paper upon. Let him observe how easy it