296 Inaugural Address by the President of the Society, 
Mr. Green in the first page of his “ Making of England” :—« I 
need scarcely say,” he says, “that I do not attempt to write a 
history of Roman Britain. Such a history, indeed, can hardly be 
attempted with any profit until the scattered records of researches 
amongst the roads, villas, tombs, &c., of this period, have been in 
some way brought together and made accessible,” or, I may add, 
until the researches have been made, which can hardly be said, as 
yet, to have been done to the extent that is requisite. I have often 
noticed in my younger sporting days, and it is a fact well known 
to sportsmen, that some hounds are apt to give tongue before they 
have got a true scent, whilst there are others whose voice can be 
relied upon. I am an old dog, and have always had a disposition 
to run mute; indeed I should not have spoken now if some of my 
friends had not given me the whip, by placing me unworthily in 
this chair. This must be my excuse for passing over with such 
slight comment the observations of previous writers on the origin 
and uses of Bokerly Dyke. I wished to approach the subject with 
an unbiassed mind, and, convinced by the experience of a number of 
years that the question could be proved by excavations, I determined, 
on the first opportunity, to make the attempt. 
But in an entrenchment of such length it is quite uncertain 
whether any relics can be found in a rampart unless the line happens 
to pass over ground that had been occupied by a village or settlement 
previously to the construction of the entrenchment, and no such 
settlement presented itself to the eye of the observer on any part of 
the line. I remained for some time in doubt, therefore, where to 
begin, when, one day, towards the middle of 1888, Mr. Lawes, the 
organist in Tollard Church, who is the conductor of my private band, 
and who had acquired an. interest in such matters by his visits to my 
Museum at Farnham, Dorset, happening to pass along the dyke to the 
south of the Salisbury Road near Woodyates, found the occupier of the 
farm—Mr. Trowbridge—engaged in cutting into the dyke to obtain 
soil for top-dressing his fields, and in so doing five copper coins 
turned up, together with a Romano-British fibula, which Mr. Lawes 
brought to me. They were Roman coins, extending from Trajan to 
Constans, and had evidently come out of the dyke. I had already 
a ee a ee 
