great antiquity.

It is possible to make a way past the woods of Sidown and by the Three
Legged Cross Inn to Ashmansworth, where a few years ago a number of
wall paintings, one an unique depictment of Pentecost, were discovered
on the walls of the little old church that are supposed to have Roman
materials built into them. From here we may continue more or less
along the summits of the chalk uplands until the famous Inkpen, or
Ingpen, Beacon is reached, in an isolated corner of north-western
Berkshire. But alas! the former glory, on the map, of the Beacon has
departed. Until quite recently it was thought that this, the highest
section of the chalk in England, exceeded that mystic 1,000 feet that
gives such a glamour to the mere hill and makes of it a local
"mountain." An added slur was cast upon Inkpen in the handing to the
neighbouring Walbury Hill Camp of an additional five feet by these
interfering Ordnance surveyors. The new maps now read--Walbury Camp
959 feet; Inkpen, 954. But the loss of 18 yards or so does not seem to
have altered the glorious view from the flat-topped Down or to have
made its air less sparkling. The grand wooded vista down the Kennet
valley toward Newbury is a sharp contrast to the bare uplands north
and south. Walbury Camp, a fine prehistoric entrenchment, is distinct
from Walbury Hill, slightly lower, on which is Combe Gallows, a relic
of the past kept in constant repair by a neighbouring farmer as a
condition of his land tenure. Inkpen village is more than a mile away
to the north. Here is a church once old but now smartened up to such
an extent that its ancient character is not apparent. The building,
however, has not lost by the change. The modern appointments are both
beautiful and costly.

[Illustration: THE INKPEN COUNTRY.]

At the back of the Beacon is the lonely little village of Combe, sunk
deep in a hollow of the hills that rise all around it. It has a small
Early English church of little interest, but the village is worth a
long detour to see because of its unique position. Here was once a
cell of the Abbey of Bec in Normandy. A stony hill-road goes out of
the settlement southwards, between the huge bulk of Oat Hill (936
feet) and Sheepless Down, back into Hampshire. The road eventually
leads to Linkenholt, another hamlet lost in the wilderness of chalk,
and then by Upton to the Andover highway at Hurstbourne Tarrant on one
of the headwaters of the Test. The map name is rarel