90 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES DISCOVERED IN WORCESTERSHIRE. 



Mr. Rudd has also a fragment of a supposed Roman flue, and pieces 

 of Roman tiles, which were found near the same place. 



Tacitus states that the Roman Propraetor Ostorius Scapula, in 

 the reign of the Emperor Claudius Caesar, constructed forts on the 

 rivers Avon and Severn ; and John Ross, a writer on antiquities, 

 who flourished in the reign of Edward IV., has reported Constan- 

 tius Csesar as the founder of Worcester, on the credit of an old 

 British chronicle he met with ; and Andrew Yarranton, in the 2nd 

 part of his work, dated 1698, states, that he discovered the hearth 

 of a Roman foot-blast, and a pot of Roman coin by its side, near 

 the walls of Worcester. This is supposed to have been at what is 

 named Cinder Point, on the east bank of the river Severn, in a place 

 called Pitchcroft, where there is an extensive bed of iron clinkers 

 and scoriae, very rich in metal, (about six feet deep in the alluvial 

 soil), imagined to be the rough and offal thrown aside in the time 

 of the Romans, they having, at that period, only foot-blasts to smelt 

 the iron-stone. 



A Roman coin, said to be of Vespasian, was found a few years 

 back, on the east side of the Worcestershire beacon of Malvern 

 hill, near St. Anil's Well, in a cavity which had been made by the 

 sheep. Roman coins were also found in the rubbish of the ancient 

 wall which was on the river-side of the old and lately demolished 

 St. Clement's Church, in Worcester. In the excavations which 

 were made at the building of the house in the centre of Britannia- 

 square, Worcester, the foundation of what is supposed to have been 

 a Roman circular tower, or fort, of sand-stone was found, about 

 thirty feet in diameter, and in the rubbish a great many Roman 

 coins were discovered, principally of Constantius and Constantine 

 the Great, and are now in the possession of Harvey Berrow Tymbs, 

 Esq. One of Domitian was found in the excavations for the new 

 houses at Lark-hill Crescent, near Perry Wood; and one of 

 Cons ( ) upon breaking up an old orchard, to make a garden, 



near the Infirmary : similar coins have also been found at various 

 other places in and about the city. All the above circumstances 

 strongly corroborate the accounts of Tacitus, Ross, and Yarranton, 

 and appear to place beyond doubt, the fact that Worcester was a 

 Roman station. 



