The Saxons do not seem to have built earth-camps, but stone fortifications on hills, like Athelstan's castle at Barnstaple, or Kenwith Castle, though they used the barrow-camps at their need. The Romans, we know, were mighty engineers, and their roads and buildings bear witness to the endurance of their handiwork, but many of these camps are indisputably not Roman, and their names bear witness to their Celtic origin. Such is the camp at Countisbury, which name is almost certainly the same as Canterbury--"Kant-ys-bury," the "camp on the headland," and which is one of the most perfect in Devonshire. It stands on a hill a thousand feet above the sea, commanding a view of the coast from Porlock to Heddon's Mouth, with the line of the Welsh coast opposite; it consists of a triple rampart and fosse, rising boldly one within the other, with a gate cut in the northern face of the rampart, and with a small mound exactly in the centre of the inner camp. How did these peoples of the Celtic speech build a work of such engineering magnitude, without the tools and appliances of the Roman civilization, with implements of flint, or at best of bronze, a work of such strategical foresight, of such nicety of proportion, and of such enduring strength, that now after the lapse of probably twenty-five centuries its bold proportions can be traced by the most casual glance of the passer-by of the road that runs past, now that the sheep clamber and feed in its deep fosses, and daisies sprinkle the grass of its ramparts?
The Saxons seem to have come more or less peaceably to the Britons of North Devon, who had taken little impress, probably, of the alien Roman civilization, except Christianity, for many of the churches round still carry the name of a Celtic saint, showing that the Saxons did not come devastating villages and destroying the little churches (in which case, of course, the churches would carry the name of a Saxon saint of their later Christianity), but settled with the inhabitants, intermarried, and probably adopted their worship. There is the church of St. Culbone, St. Brendon--that tiny village of Brendon, near Lynton, which must have been a village, with a rude little church of its own, before Hengist and Horsa landed--of St. Dubricius at Porlock, of St. Brannock at Braunton, near Barnstaple.