The Aeolian Islands are situated off the north coast of Sicily, not far from the entrance to the Straits of Messina. They can be reached by a daily service of steamboats from the port of Milazzo, 20 miles west of Messina. There is a daily train, called Freccia di Sul, that goes direct from Milan to Palermo, stopping at Milazzo; The northernmost of the islands is Stromboli with its famous active volcano. The chief town is Lipari on the island of that name; here on its acropolis excavations directed by Professor Bernabo Brea on behalf of the Soprintendenza alle Antichita della Sicilia Orientale have revealed a stratified succession of huts, ranging from the neolithic period down to Hellenistic, Roman and modern times. These excavations and others on other islands have shown that, small though they be, the islands once played an important part in the culture of the western Mediterranean.

On a bit of marsh-mound land cast up in the James River was planted the first permanent English settlement in America. The landing at Jamestown, 13 May (o.s.), 1607, did not represent the first attempt to found an English colony on the eastern seaboard. In 1585 an expedition under the command of Sir Richard Grenville and with Ralph Lane as Lieutenant-Governor established the ill-fated Roanoke Island colony off the coast of North Carolina. By 1590 it had vanished—to this day the fate of the ‘Lost Colony’ is uncertain.

It has long been recognized that during the latter part of the 1st millennium B.C., as in other periods, there was contact between Spain and western Britain, and it has been claimed that there are structural resemblances between hill-forts in those areas. But although an excellent account of the Iron Age in northern Spain has been available for some time to English readers, it deals almost exclusively with the portable relics, and gives very little information about the forts themselves. Moreover, the original publications which deal with these remains are very scarce in Britain. It therefore seems worth while to give some account of four which the writer was able to visit during 1954. They were selected primarily because their defences incorporated chevaux-de-frise, which seem generally to be rare outside Spain, but which occur on two sites in Wales, and elsewhere in Britain.