There is a deep hollow within the camp, surrounded by an embankment, opposite the sally-port to the pool. It suggests the site of buildings for protection against weather; but it must also be confessed it may have been made in a search for stone. The chief entrance to the camp is at its narrow south-eastern end. It is well protected by the entrenchments which extend along the southern side. There are also two pits in front of the eastern bastion, which might be very useful in defence. A hollow extends down the field approaching the camp, and there is a drop in the ground of from three to four feet, for above a hundred yards at the fence, which suggests also the position of a stockade. The altitude of the hill is not very great, the barometers to-day, as compared by arrangement with the Free Library, Hereford, made it 622.5 feet above sealevel, which is fairly approximate.* It is not nearly so high as Aconbury hill (which has been ascertained by careful measurement to be 915 feet above sea-level) but has a far wider range of sight. From the position Caplar hill occupies in the valley of the Wye, the views from it are most varied and extensive. To the west are seen the Black mountains, the Sugar-loaf, and the Skirrids; and towards the north, the Radnorshire hills; the Clee hills in Shropshire; the Malvern hills to the east; and May hill and the Forest of Dean to the south; with so rich an array of intervening hills, woodlands, and valleys, as to make the scenery extremely fine and interesting. It is the only place from which the spires of Hereford and Ross may be seen from the same spot. From a military point of view, the advantages it might afford would be very great. It not only commands the river from a considerable distance, but is in full view of the neighbouring camps of Fownhope, St. Ethelbert's camp on Backbury hill, Oldbury, Caradoc, Aconbury, and Dinedor, which surround it; but it is in sight of Credenhill, Sutton Walls, and the more distant Herefordshire Beacon; besides numerous other hills and places that circumstances might render important. Horseley considered this camp to possess all the characteristics of a true British camp, and the leading authorities agree with him. It is supposed to have been formed by Caractacus in his march across the county from Little Doward towards the Grand Camp on the Herefordshire Beacon. As Shenstone wrote, with reference to a similarly fortified hill, it may be said here "'Twas on those heights, by Roman hosts annoy'd, They tinged their bodies, but unmasked their minds." It is conjectured also, with great probability, that this camp was occupied by the Romans; and it certainly may be stated with still higher probability, that in the long period of unrecorded English history, Saxons and Anglo-Saxons occupied the camp, settled the district, and have left their traces in the names of the people and places. *The nearest Ordnance Survey Bench Mark is upon the building north of Caplar Lodge, at which Bench Mark the altitude is given as 449'7 feet. A remarkable feature in the physical history of Caplar hill must not be passed by. It shares the liability to landslips, with all the hills around the large Woolhope dome of Silurian rocks. The great disturbance of the upheaval seems to have so shaken their stratification, that, by the gradual action of water, large portions slide away from time to time. It is remarkable too, that the landslips occur in the outer crust of the Silurian rocks, called Upper Ludlow rocks, as well as in the Old Red Sandstone rocks adjoining, through which the Dome was forced. Thus it was, doubtless, with the landslip which carried away part of St. Ethelbert's Camp on Backbury hill, at some unrecorded period; the well-known landslip at Marcle, called "The Wonder," where twenty acres of land moved from February the 17th to the 19th, in 1575, is another example; that at Claston Farm, Dadnor hill, Dormington, which occurred on March 15th, 1844, when upwards of three acres of land with forty oak trees standing upon it, moved two hundred yards down, is another; and others of lesser magnitude might be named. The following account of the landslip of Caplar hill is given in Mr. Cooke's History of Herefordshire, Vol. iii., p. 241. "This hill experienced a landslip of considerable extent in April, 1793, when the ground sank fifty perpendicular feet, and then moved forward. It was witnessed by a labourer, who, when working near a hedge, found the ground moving, and at the same moment heard a loud noise resembling a distant hailstorm. Running from his work towards the river, across a narrow meadow, he observed with alarm the sloping hill, with trees on it, moving gradually towards him, and this progressive movement is represented to have continued from Thursday to the next morning. It was a movement downwards, and in its progress S. W. It has left immense caverns in the earth, and moved stones there of the magnitude of five or six tons. A number of trees were thrown down, some moved standing and are now remaining so. A large old yew tree was moved nearly sixty feet, and is now standing firm and uninjured. The people assert that six acres of ground were moved. Some part of the fallen earth reached the river, and had the fall continued it must have materially affected the face of the stream."-Gentleman's Magazine. The general progress of the Caplar hill landslip, lasting so many hours, closely resembles that on Marcle hill, which moved for forty-two hours. Here, however, the slip of rocks was Old Red Sandstone, whilst at St. Ethelbert's camp, and at Marcle, and at Dormington it was the Upper Ludlow rocks, of the Silurian system, that were affected. The estate of Brockhampton was owned for many generations by an old yeoman family of Herefordshire, the Skyrmes. It was this family who produced and gave their name to that valuable orchard fruit, Skyrme's Kernel. The grandson, Thomas Skyrme Prothero, sold the estate in 1833 to another old Herefordshire family, the Stallards. This family restored the church and planted the approach to the Camp from the western side, and Mr. Stallard bought also Woldbury, or Caplar Camp, which had not before belonged to the estate, from the Powells of Woolhope. To such old families, in times gone by, might well apply the oftquoted Kentish distich "A gentleman of Wales, a knight of Cales, and a laird of the North Countree; The Stallards suffered for their loyalty in the troublous times of the Civil War. It is stated by Mr. Cooke in the History of Herefordshire, Vol. iii., that "Richard Stallard had to compound for his lands in Ross and Weston for having adhered to the forces raised for Charles I. against the Parliament" (Royal Comp. Papers, 2nd series, Vol. xlviii., p. 7). In 1869 the estate was again sold. Sir Christopher R. Lighton, Bart., who has succeeded his father in the possession, has erected a commodious residentiary mansion upon it; and it is by his kind permission that the Club now visits the Camp. Caplar hill, and indeed all the Woolhope district, is classic botanical ground. Mr. John Stackhouse, a descendant of an old Cornish family, succeeded to the Manor of How Caple in 1764. He was a Fellow of Exeter College, the author of the Nereis Britannica and other works, and moreover an excellent botanist. He was a Member of the Linnæan Society, and a friend of Dr. Withering. He made the first synoptical arrangement of British Agarics, as given in Withering's great work on British Plants. In this work the name of Mr. Stackhouse is often quoted as the authority for funguses and other plants found in the Caplar or Woolhope woods. Thus Caplar is given as a locality for the funguses, Clavaria Herculaneum, the "Club of Hercules"; Polyporus perennis, on 'the charcoal heaps of the Dean and Chapter grove"; the elegant little Nidularis campanulata; Russula integer; Agaricus ovalis; piperatus, terreus, &c., and many others are named as found in the Woolhope woods. Mr. Stackhouse's son, Mr Thos. Pendarves Stackhouse, who graduated at Jesus College, Cambridge, M.A., 1807, succeeded his father in the manor of How Caple, married Mr. Thos. Andrew Knight's eldest daughter, and getting the manor and estate of Acton Scott in Shropshire, added the name of Acton to his own. His widow was the highly gifted lady, Mrs. Stackhouse Acton, who has so often aided the enquiries of the Woolhope Club, and who died only last year, 1882. 66 Badgers are still to be found in the recesses of Carey wood, and they wander still to Brockhampton occasionally. Vipers are still to be found here, as they are in places throughout the Woolhope District; but they are not so numerous on Caplar hill since Mr. Stallard destroyed the gorse bushes, which formed their stronghold. Insects exist in great variety, and the more rare plants of the district will now be mentioned to you by the Rev. Augustin Ley. ON THE MORE RARE PLANTS OF THE DISTRICT. By the Rev. AUGUSTIN LEY, M.A. SOME of my earliest recollections are connected with an outlook, in which the hill upon which we are now standing forms a prominent feature. Caplar Camp and the yew trees which mark its south-east angle, were conspicuous objects from the windows of my father's house; and I remember distinctly an occasion when I was eight years old, on which I was taken by some uncles of mine upon an expedition to what seemed to me then an enormous distance, when after my being carried pic-a-back along some very muddy lanes, we arrived at length at Caplar hill and Caplar Camp. It must have been, I think, a year or two earlier than this that the present Vicar of Lugwardine used to frighten me, as a child, by the idea of the dragons which inhabited the solitudes of the Carey woods just behind Aramstone house; and I remember distinctly the awe with which the idea inspired me when I was wandering in them alone. Since that first expedition, and those childish years, I have made many others to this place; Carey woods and Caplar hill being reserved for us boys as a holiday treat for a long ramble in search of birds' nests and flowers, and I shall always connect Caplar with the unique pleasure which a lover of nature derives from forming his first acquaintance with some of the less common among our common plants. I ask your pardon for imposing upon you in the beginning of my paper these childish trifles; my apology must be that in my relation to birds and flowers I feel still but a grown-up child--and indeed in our botanical pleasures of later years, how much is but a child's ramble grown-up; the same love of outward nature, and the same wonder what may come next, deepened, it may be, by an increased sense of beauty and a more intelligent questioning in Nature's great open secret? But at least these childish reminiscences may not be an unsuitable beginning of a botanist's paper, since they, and such as they form the common beginning of a botanist's life. Geologically speaking, Caplar lies wholly within the Old Red Sandstone formation, and you must therefore not expect to hear of a rich flora. It is the dominating point of a ridge running S.W. for about 3 miles, and forming the earliest of those characteristic great horse-shoe bends which mark the lower course of the Wye, from Caplar downwards to the Wyndcliff and Llancaut, and add so beautiful a feature to its scenery. The view obtained from the western face of Caplar hill over the Wye, running immediately underneath, and over the expanse of country both to the north and south, is well known and justly admired. The steep northern escarpment of the ridge just mentioned is densely clothed with wood, and varies in breadth from one to two hundred yards at its western extremity to three parts of a mile at Caplar hill. This wood takes the name of the "Carey woods," and is the home and hiding place of many of the pretty though |