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ROMAN ANTIQUITIES DISCOVERED IN 

 WORCESTERSHIRE. 



By Jabez Allies, Esq. 



Since my paper on Roman antiquities, &c., discovered in the 

 city and county of Worcester (an abridged account of which appear- 

 ed in vol. iv., p. 85, of The Analyst), further discoveries have been 

 made at the Kempsey Gravel Pit,* where five or six more cists for 

 burial by cremation have been found, and which were roofed with 

 clay and broken pebbles. One of them was of an oval shape, near 

 three yards long, two yards broad, and about five feet deep in the 

 gravel. The others were smaller and not quite so deep. Some of 

 the latter merely contained black ashes j others contained ashes and 

 fragments of red-earth pottery, made in the Roman mode (the mouth 

 of one of the urns is twenty-eight inches in circumference) and 

 the greatest cist contained black ashes and a large broken pan of 

 coarse materials like those made by the ancient British t, and judging 

 from a segment of the pan, it was three feet in circumference. Out 

 of this cist there was a passage into a smaller one. A fragment 

 found in one of the cists has a small handle situated at the shoulder 

 part of it, the bow of which is only large enough to admit the lit- 

 tle finger, and the side of the fragment is partly indented for the 

 purpose. 



As great alterations are occasionally made at the site of the above- 

 mentioned Roman camp, I will endeavour to give an account of it 

 from its present relics j fearing that, in a few more years, almost 

 every vestige of it will have past away. 



The west vallum lay on the ridge of ground, or precipice, skirt- 

 ing the flat on the east side of the Severn. The north end of 

 it commenced at the back of the garden belonging to the Parsonage 

 Farm-house, and ran in a line from thence to within about 15 yards 



* This gravel-pit, the property of Joseph Smith, Esq., is situated in a 

 ploughed field, called the Moors, on the ridge or precipice of ground, out 

 of floods way, which skirts the flat on the east side of the river Severn, and 

 lies between that river and the village of Kempsey, near the northern side 

 of a vallum, which by many writers is described as a Roman camp, and with- 

 in the site of the southern end of which camp, Kempsey church stands. 



•\ In my previous account, I suggested that there formerly might have 

 been a tumulus over the cists at Kempsey ; but that only applied to those 

 cists which I considered were ancient British or Komanized British cists, 

 and not to those which were purely Roman. 



