34 On Roman Remains found at Holbury, near Dean, 
In vol. ii. of the Archzological Journal, published in 1846, it is 
stated, on the authority of the late Mr. Hatcher, of Salisbury, that 
the site of an unexplored Roman villa exists in Clarendon Wood, 
about three miles from Salisbury, and that numerous coins have 
been there discovered. Mr. Hatcher was too accurate an observer 
to have made a statement in print which was without foundation. 
It is fair however to say that Sir Frederick Bathurst, the owner of 
Clarendon, has no knowledge of the circumstance, although he has 
in his possession a considerable number of Roman coins which have 
been found upon his property. 
At West Dean, four miles further on, a tesselated pavement was 
discovered as early as 1741, and brought under the notice of the 
Society of Antiquaries. A description of it is given by Sir Richard 
Colt Hoare in his History of Wilts. The central portion of it was 
extracted entire, and conveyed to London, where it was made a 
public exhibition, at an inn at Charing Cross. I have been unsuc- 
cessful in my endeavours to ascertain its subsequent fate, or to 
obtain a drawing of its design, which however is represented to 
have been a circle, composed of 28 intersecting circles, or segments 
of circles, of black and white tesserz, half-an-inch square, surround- 
ing a four-leaved white flower. In 1846, the Railway, then in 
process of construction, passed over the site, when the foundations 
of a very extensive villa were disclosed, and further portions of pave- 
ments were necessarily destroyed. They seem to have been composed 
of tesserze of various sizes, from an inch to a quarter of an inch 
square. A great quantity of these are still lying, untouched since 
that time, in a builder’s yard close by, but they are so detached and 
broken up that they convey no notion whatever of the patterns of 
which they formed part. The specimens I have obtained are set in 
a coarse concrete of broken brick and mortar; the larger tessere are 
all of stone, about an inch square ; the smaller and finer ones formed 
squares or diamonds of red and white, each composed of four tessere. 
Mr. Baring Wall, M.P., the then owner of the soil, caused further 
excavations to be made in a field adjoming the Railway Station, and 
disclosed the foundations of rooms and corridors, a ground plan of 
which, together with drawings of portions of the pavements, as then 
