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Still the ancient Foss Way, which once extended from Lincolnshire to Devonshire, formed the best route, and it was decided to travel by it, making a brief detour, so as to enable the party to pass the first night at the residence of an old friend of the family who dwelt on the high borderland which separates the counties of Oxford and Warwick, in old times the frontier between the two Celtic tribes, the Dobuni and the Carnabii.
Early in the morning our travellers arose and took their way through an open country which abounded with British and Roman remains; no fewer than three entrenched camps, once fortifying the frontier of the Dobuni, lying within sight or hard by the road, which, skirting the summit of the watershed between the Thames and the Avon, afforded magnificent views.
In an hour they reached the Foss Way and rode along the route described in our former chapter, until, reaching the frontiers of the territory of the old Dobuni, they left the Foss, and rode by the Roman trackway which we have previously described, until they turned into a road which brought them deep into Oxfordshire.
At Cirencester, the Romano-British centre for the canton of the Dobuni and a still larger town than Wroxeter, the 'insulae' near the Basilica seem to have measured as much as 120 yards in length, though full details have not yet been obtained. Both these towns may be ascribed to the later years of the first century and to the same civilizing process as Silchester and Caerwent.
When they had emerged from the forest, they had, as we have seen, ascended the high tableland which formed the northern frontier of the territory of the Dobuni passing over the very ground where, seven hundred years later, the troops of the King and the Parliament were arrayed against each other in deadly combat for the first time.
Moreover, our position is far worse now than it was ten years ago. The Belgae and Dumnonii in the southwest have been crushed after thirty battles; the Dobuni in the centre have been defeated and garrisoned; the Silures have set an example to us all, inflicting many defeats on the Romans; but their power has at last been broken.
As this great strategical centre the key of the west had formerly been the capital of the Dobuni, whose name it sometimes bears, it might easily have come down to us as Durchester, or Dobchester, instead of under its existing guise. The city was captured by the West Saxons in 577, and is then called Ciren ceaster in the brief record of the conquerors.
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