Welsh Journals

made south Europe rather arid and connections between Britain and the west Mediterranean diminished, whereas communications with north-west France and the Low Countries were very active at times. There can be little doubt that the great stone monuments continued to be sacred and probably not a few of them were built in the bronze age, some may be even later. Old Mediterranean connections suggest non-Indo-European speech for early Britain and the late Sir John Morris Jones drew attention to features in Welsh which he thought must be a heritage from non-Indo-European tongues. About 750 B.C. or later a wet cool climate brought poverty to Britain and there was little occasion for a reviving Spain at first to revive old trade routes to Britain. In the fifth century B.C. or a little later increased warmth, without drought, permitted growth of population and exchanges in Western Europe among peoples who already spoke or were learning the Celtic languages. Earth- works were built afresh and ancient ones were remodelled in various parts of Britain and trade with the western Mediterranean was of some importance by the second century B.C. Roman and Anglo-Saxon later on drove some refugees west- wards but then, as now, the mass of the people remains, it is only specially equipped persons who are likely to escape. So both England and Wales undoubtedly retain many descendants of their pre-Roman peoples, to a considerable extent similar in both cases. Before the agriculturists of the Loess or the coastwise maritime immigrants had brought the elements of food production to Britain it had a scanty population which collected, hunted and fished. In Wales with its flint-less moorlands they were mostly beach-collectors with what is called a mesolithic culture. Ways from England by land were limited because of the great damp woodlands of Cheshire and the lower Severn leaving but a few broken ridges between the southern end of the Pennines and east central Wales. So Wales was far more influenced by the maritime movement than by that from central Europe which spent itself mainly on the eastern half of Britain though a few beaker pots and other items have been found in Wales. The early relations of Wales by sea with south- west Europe on the one hand and the Scottish Isles and Scandinavia on the other remained important until the Middle Ages. These connections in the days of the early Megaliths brought to Britain people from south west Europe and they spread especially into