AN- ACCOUNT OF A ROMAN PUBLIC WAY. 533 
of these roads, meeting at Wigan, is given in Mr. 
Baines’s History of the County of Lancaster, 
Division 10, under the head of Wigan Parish. 
The tracing of the Road from Manchester to 
Wigan, being not satisfactory for the purposes of 
the survey of this county by the Board of 
Ordnance, the tracing of this Road was resumed 
in 1844. 
The road from Manchester to Wigan, appears 
to be a public way, because it is generally about 
twelve yards broad: because it often deviates 
from the straight line, that it may run along hard 
and level ground ; and because, in Worsley Park, 
at Gadbury Fold, and at a few other places, 
where the Road has been preserved, it is found 
to be closely paved. 
Very few traces of this Road are now left. A 
great part of it passes through populous manufac- 
turing districts, and through fields in a high state 
of cultivation. It is, indeed, remarkable how 
entirely this Road has disappeared in the last 
seventy-two years, in the neighbourhood of Hope 
Hall and Worsley, where it was found by Mr. 
Whitaker, and minutely described by him in 
1773, in his History of Manchester. 
4B 
