230 SOME NOTES ON DEEPDALE CAVE, BUXTON. 



different texture, and probably of widely differing dates. Three 

 of these are pieces of coarse, strong, reddish ware, in two 

 instances coloured right through, and in the third having a bluish 

 grey centre. Others are of a blackish grey colour, and of Hghter 

 make. Several of them have formed parts of large open vessels. 

 There is one piece of fine chocolate paste, that probably, with 

 one or two others, came from the large Roman potteries of 

 Northamptonshire. There is one piece of a dull, whitish grey 

 that is evidently part of the rim of a mortarium of continental 

 make. A small and beautifully glazed fragment is undoubted 

 foreign Samian ; and another coarser piece of the same style may, 

 with equal assurance, be termed pseudo or imitation Samian. It 

 is not a little remarkable to hold in one's hand this tiny collection 

 of potsherds, weighing in all not eleven ounces, gathered almost 

 at haphazard from the clay on the floor of a little limestone cave 

 in an out-of-the-way Derbyshire glen, and to know that this 

 handful of fragments has been brought there from countries and 

 places hundreds, nay, perhaps thousands of miles apart from each 

 other, and there deposited and used by people, the most ancient 

 of whom may have been there very many centuries before Christ, 

 and the most recent at least fifteen hundred years before Mr. 

 Salt disturbed them from their resting place. 



No further surmises shall, however, be now indulged in, for it 

 is to be hoped that the caves of Deepdale (there are more than 

 one) may ere long be systematically explored, and that the results 

 may be made known to the members of our Society by some 

 competent pen. 



The Editor was only anxious that the present Journal should 

 not be issued without some brief chronicle of these noteworthy 

 investigations so far as they have yet been pursued. 



