Ocellum Promontorium

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Modern memory and observation can render no assistance in an attempt to give a history of the long lost maritime town of Ravenspukne, in Holderness; and where all evidence is to be drawn from ancient records, neither numerous, nor generally accessible, it is only by a careful collection of scattered facts,...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Modern memory and observation can render no assistance in an attempt to give a history of the long lost maritime town of Ravenspukne, in Holderness; and where all evidence is to be drawn from ancient records, neither numerous, nor generally accessible, it is only by a careful collection of scattered facts, that a faint representation can be given of a place which has had no local existence for many generations. Jam seges est ubi Troia fuit, was said of Troy; but the patient Antiquary, in his travels in Holderness, may sit on the banks of the Humber, and watch the ebbing of the tide, without being able to discern a blade of grass, where once stood the market-town, and sea-port of Ravenspurne. THO. THOMPSON. Cottingham Castle, 1821. chapter{{Section 4OCELLUM PROMONTORIUM; Ceterum Dritanniam qui Mortales initio coluerint, indigcnae an adrecti, ut inter Barbaras; parum compertum. Tacitus, Vil. de Agrlcol. . Whether the first inhabitants of Britain, of whicli we have any credible account, were natives of the island, or adventitious settlers, is a question which cannot now be resolved. Barbarous nations like the ancient Britons, were ignorant of their origin, and preserved no records of their antiquity. At the time of the Roman invasion, the ancient Britons appear to have lived in forests, in the most superstitious subjection to the Druids, who were famous in the northern nations as priests and philosophers. But as the Druids did not communicate their knowledge to the world in writing, succeeding ages have derived little benefit from their learning, which indeed from all we know of it at the present time, was not worth preserving. Caes. de Bell. Gall. lib. 6, 13. Cassar informs us that many of the inland inhabitants of Britain sowed no corn, but lived on milk...