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The country was much intersected and poorly furnished with grain, the towns were situated for the most part on cliffs and tongues of land, and were accessible from the mainland only by shallows which it was difficult to cross; the provision of supplies and the conducting of sieges were equally difficult for the army attacking by land, while the Celts by means of their vessels could furnish the towns easily with everything needful, and in the event of the worst could accomplish their evacuation.
The first instinct of an imaginative stranger might have been to suppose it the person of one of the Celts who built the barrow, so far had all of modern date withdrawn from the scene. It seemed a sort of last man among them, musing for a moment before dropping into eternal night with the rest of his race. There the form stood, motionless as the hill beneath.
As to its results in Italy, first of all the Celts were now certainly, if they had not been already beforehand, destined to destruction; and the execution of the doom was only a question of time.
Geoffrey's popular History, written less than a century after the Conquest, made conquerors and conquered alike proud of their country by its stories of heroes who, curiously enough, were neither Norman nor Saxon, but creations of the native Celts. Thus does literature, whether in a battle song or a history, often play the chief role in the development of nationality.
Prestwich, who found in 1859 a flint tool in situ in the same stratum at Amiens that contained the remains of extinct mammalia. The flint implements found at Abbeville and Amiens are most of them considered to be hatchets and spear-heads, and are different from those commonly called "celts."
The Saxons had now been for four centuries in Britain, the older inhabitants of which Celts like the Gauls and Irish they had cruelly harassed, just as the Milesian Irish oppressed their Belgic predecessors, and as the Normans, in turn, will be found oppressing both Celt and Saxon in England and Ireland.
In his treatise on hunting, Arrian tells us that the Celts used to offer an annual sacrifice to Artemis on her birthday, purchasing the sacrificial victim with the fines which they had paid into her treasury for every fox, hare, and roe that they had killed in the course of the year.
These however were details. Uniformity was desirable. The monasteries were doomed, and before long means were found to enlist most of the Irish landowners, Celts no less than Normans, in favour of the despoliation.
Thereafter, for several centuries, the strength of the Celts lay in the west in Moidart, Knoydart, Morar, Mamore, Lochaber, and Kintyre, and in the western islands, which fell into the hands of "the sons of Somerled," the Macdonalds.
The land of the Celts was still in a ferment, and a war seemed imminent between Rome and Macedonia: he had good reason now to throw off the mask without delay and to carry the war whithersoever he pleased, before the Romans began it at their own convenience with a descent on Africa.
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