A History of Horncastle (in Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 023 )

A History of Horncastle (in Short Nonfiction Collection Vol. 023 )PART I—PREHISTORIC. HORNCASTLE—ITS INFANCY.In dealing with what may be called “the dark ages” of local history, weare often compelled to be content with little more than reasonableconjecture. Still, there are generally certain surviving data, inplace-names, natural features, and so forth, which enable those who candetect them, and make use of them, to piece together something like aconnected outline of what we may take, with some degree of probability,as an approximation to what have been actual facts, although lacking, atthe time, the chronicler to record them.It is, however, by no means a mere exercise of the imagination, if weassume that the site of the present Horncastle was at a distant period aBritish settlement. Dr. Brewer says, “nearly three-fourths of ourRoman towns were built on British sites,”and in the case of Horncastle, although there is nothingBritish in the name of the town itself, yet that people have undoubtedlyhere left their traces behind them. The late Dr. Isaac Taylor says,“Rivers and mountains, as a rule, receive their names from the earliestraces, towns and villages from later colonists.” The ideas of thoseearly occupants were necessarily limited. The hill which formed theirstronghold against enemies, or which was the “high place” of theirreligious rites, and the river which was so essential to their dailyexistence, of these they felt the value, and therefore naturallydistinguished them by name before anything else. Thus the remark of aneloquent writer is generally true, who says “our mountains and riversstill murmur the voices of races long extirpated.” “There is hardly(says Dr. Tayl