ROMANO-BRITISH NORTHAMPTONSHIRE 



places standing ten or eleven feet high. The individual remains — houses 

 of various types, pottery works, numerous portable objects — are abun- 

 dant and notable. There is perhaps no other site save Verulam through- 

 out the non-military parts of Roman Britain which would better repay 

 extensive, systematic and scientific excavation. It is greatly to be hoped 

 that those interested in local archaeology will see that such an excavation 

 is soon made. 



As a whole the site may be described roughly as extending four 

 miles from east to west and two from north to south (fig. 4). The wind- 

 ing Nene bisects it, the Roman high road from the south to Ancaster 

 and Lincoln cuts straight across it in its unswerving north-westerly 

 course and, as it crosses the river, throws out a branch which runs due 

 north into Lincolnshire. Along these roads and east of them lie those 

 portions of the site where the houses are thickest and the semblance of 

 a town most definite. The rest of the site, particularly its western part 

 towards Sibson, Wansford and Sutton, was less densely occupied. We 

 may conveniently divide our closer description into three parts : the 

 ' town ' south of the Nene, that north of it near Castor, and the re- 

 mainder which we may provisionally style suburbs. 



On the south side of the Nene, between the river and the modern 

 highroad, lie some fields known as 'the Castles,' where the visitor can yet 

 discern the outline of a once fortified enclosure and the traces of Roman 

 occupation, brick and tile and potsherds, lying on the surface. In shape 

 the enclosure is an irregular hexagon, more oval than round ; in area it 

 measures 45—50 acres ; the Roman highroad traverses it from end to 

 end. It has nearer been explored. Stukeley tells us that the foundations 

 of the south gate, constructed in hewn stone, were discovered by drainers 

 in 1739 ; he adds, apparently on similar evidence, that the place was 

 girt with a stone wall and a ditch 50 feet wide, but his observations 

 were hardly minute enough to do more than confirm the fact, still obvious 

 enough, that the enclosure had some sort of rampart and ditch around it. 

 In the interior were dwellings. Artis marks the sites of twenty-two 

 scattered up and down the area, and indicates in one of his plates that 

 there were hypocausts and rooms whose walls were lined with thin slabs 

 of local marble from Alwalton — sufficient signs of domestic comfortable 

 life.' Close outside the north end of the enclosure and the north gate- 

 way were other buildings — houses and potters' kilns, and three note- 

 worthy objects have also been found here. An inscribed fragment, 

 MARTO, was discovered, as Artis tells us, in ' removing a part of the old 

 wall on the north side of the fortified ground.' Unfortunately he does 

 not add whether this old wall was the Roman rampart or some other 

 structure.* A rude bas relief of Hercules, also recorded by Artis, was 



* Stukeley's Letters (Surtees Society's publications), iii. 60 ; Artis, pi. xxiii, xrvi. (i) and (2). 

 TroUope erroneously transfers the south gateway to Castor. Alwalton marble resembles Purbcck marble, 

 but is more shelly in texture, lighter in colour and perhaps more durable ; it was used in the Middle 

 Ages, e.g. for Peterborough Cathedral. 



* Artis, pi. XV. (1) ; Corf us Inscriftionum Latitiarum, vii. 79 ; Efhemer'is epigr. vii. 841. 



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