History
English downland has attracted human habitation since prehistoric times. The ancient track known as the Ridgeway runs along the Berkshire Downs. Prehistoric sites in the Downs include Wayland's Smithy (Neolithic), numerous tumuli (Neolithic or Bronze Age), Uffington White Horse (Bronze Age), Liddington Castle and Uffington Castle (Bronze Age and Iron Age), and Segsbury Camp and Grim's Ditch (Iron Age).
It is generally thought that in Anglo-Saxon times the downs were known as Æscesdūn or Ashdown, and that it was here that the Battle of Ashdown was fought in 871.
Read more about this topic: Berkshire Downs
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)