St. Maurice can boast of as long a history as any town in the country. Looking backwards it is lost in the mists of Time, and it only reveals itself with real distinctness when the Romans made the town the centre of their activities in Valais, and Julius Cæsar threw up walls and fortifications around it and gave it the name of _Tarnade_ or _Ager Tarnadensis_. The well-known savant and archæologist, Dean Bourban, of the Abbey of St. Maurice, says that the road which crosses the bridge and runs beside the Rhone, through the defile, through the town and on to Martigny and the Grand St. Bernard, is the selfsame road used by the Gauls on their way to Italy, and by the Romans on their way to Gaul and Germany. There is at Bourg St. Pierre, the last village on the road to the Grand St. Bernard, an ancient milestone, marking the twenty-fourth mile between Aosta and Martigny on the great military route which ran from Milan, through St. Maurice, to Mayence in Germany. On the front of the old town hall of St. Maurice is an inscription saying: “I am Christian since the year 58”. According to tradition St. Peter crossed the Grand St. Bernard and preached Christianity throughout Valais, and if this be fact, then he must of necessity have been to St. Maurice. But the town’s present name was not then in existence; it is derived from the massacre in 302 of the Theban Legion commanded by Maurice. The massacre is said to have occurred in what is now the Bois Noir, about two miles out along the road to Martigny—a wild sparse forest of stunted pines beneath which the lovely rosy springtime heather (_Erica carnea_) luxuriates. This forest was the scene, too, of the terrible rockfall in 1835 from the summit of the Dent du Midi, which mountain, in its grandest and most gaunt aspect, dominates this part of the valley, having as _vis-à-vis_ the Dent de Morcles.[5] The old Abbey of St. Maurice, built upon pagan foundations, was for centuries a spoilt child of the Church. Endowments and gifts were showered upon it by Charlemagne and other kings and princes, and its actually existing treasure is priceless, including as it does specimens of gold and silversmiths’ art from the sixth to the seventeenth centuries.[6] High up on the side of the precipitous cliffs at the back of the abbey is an ancient hermitage. As one looks at it from the town there appears no sign of a path or even of a ledge for the chapel; but on closer inspection one finds a steep and stony way up, bordered at intervals throughout its length by Stations of the Cross. When I visited it some years ago the hermit was absent, but there were rats in abundance. Pilgrimages to this chapel used to be frequent (I believe that it is closed at present), and I understand that on these occasions freshly broken stone was strewn about the path, and that those who felt their consciences in need of drastic measures went up the whole way on their hands and knees.