Up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Storeton contained several inns for the entertainment of wayfarers. In the rear of one cottage, lately rebuilt, was to be found the capacious arched cellar cut in the rock, and by another, the ranges of stabling for pack-horses, now ruinous and disused. Many of the roads seem to date from an extreme antiquity, and there are few villages which can show so many fragments of them in their primitive condition, though now overgrown with thickets of willow and briar, rose, bramble, and gorse, the haunt of gipsies and the delight of artists.

Their value, as evidences of the importance of Storeton as a strategic, if not a defensive centre, is however rather to be dwelt upon in the study of Storeton's antiquities. It will be shewn that the Romans had access to Storeton, but among these many ancient routes none can be certainly distinguished as of their construction. It can only be suggested that faint traces running below the southwestern crest of the hill, and in many places now obliterated, seem to connect, by their fragments, the point at Oxton, in Arno vale, where Roman coins were found, with other traces that tend, in a fairly straight direction, towards Willaston and Chester, their traces being lost chiefly in the lower grounds in modern roads beyond that point.

EARLIEST OCCUPANTS.

But earlier occupation than the Roman is discernible in the township. On the western, southern, and parts of the eastern slopes of the eastern hill, are to be seen long terrace-like ridges, now mostly ploughed down by modern cultivation to mere horizontal undulations, which stretch below both sides, beneath the quarried crest, and coil round the southern end where it falls into the plateau. On this latter side four such terraces, and possibly a

fifth, are easily distinguished; on the west side, three; and just without the township, in Higher Bebington, are four more, but much broken by the houses and crofts of the village. These lines are not natural formations, but the remnants of primeval tillage of remote antiquity. They have no relation to the present enclosures of the land, and little with the roads; even the older ones cross and intersect them, in a manner that indicates the later origin of the roads; while the long level lines pass through field and road, around the hill sides, reaching beyond the township to the neighbouring hill of Prenton, where also some rude flint implements have been found, which may partly indicate the ancient settlements. These terraced lines are best seen on a clear day, towards sunset, when their course is most strongly marked through the fields by the lights and shadows of the undulations.

That these lines are of artificial origin has also been ascertained by sections cut across them, in cuttings made in the course of building at Higher Bebington. In these, the ploughing down of the soil into terraced strips was plainly evident, the hollow formed on the higher part of the slope by ploughing, and the raised vallum on the lower side from the earth worked down the incline, being quite apparent, as well as the rounding down of these terraces by later culture. These steep terrace banks are called lynches, and the divisions on the terraces, where the plough turned at the end of each strip of ploughland, are named balks, and of these latter divisions also faint traces here and there remain.

The origin of this communal cultivation stretches far beyond the reach of history, and marks the first introduction of agriculture by tribes or village communities, each village holding and cultivating the land in common possession, ruled by its own tribal

laws and officers. To each family was divided every season by lot their share of ploughlands, and provision was made for the rotation of crops and fallow, by the communal rules. Each family usually had allotted to them a number of the narrow strips of ploughland, each of about half an acre to an acre, the total of which usually amounted to thirty acres; but inasmuch as these were distributed by lot, the strips as often as not did not lie together. It is remarkable that on the south-west of the eastern or quarry hill, where these terraces are well marked, there was, within living memory, an enclosure of barely an acre, which bore the name of the "Thirty Acre Field," almost the last remnant of the ancient distribution of strips of land whose name has survived to give the tradition of its use.

TUMULUS.

On the southern end of the same hill, facing the west, and still within the circuit of the terraced lines, we find another significant name, "Humlison's" or "Umlison's Field." No such personal name is known to exist; but the same name is attached to a series of ancient earthworks in Herefordshire; and Humbledown, the site of a fortified early British settlement in Scotland, is possibly derived from the

same source.1

Within the fir wood that crowns this part of the hill, and near its highest ridge, stands a pile of sandy soil, about 100 feet long by 80 wide, in the form of a tumulus, and this lies on the edge of the field. Popular tradition in the neighbourhood says that this mound was brought here as a fox-earth,

I At Humbleton, near Wooler, in Northumberland, is an ancient entrenchment, with a large cairn; and the names of Hamble (Southampton), Hambleden (Bucks), Hambledon (Southampton and Surrey), Hambleton (Lancashire, Rutland, and Yorkshire), Humber (Hereford), Humbershoe (Bedford), Humberston (Lincoln), Humberstone (Leicester), Humberton (York), Humbleton (York), Humby (Lincoln), Humshaugh (Northumberland), occur in Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of England. [ED.]