omc iUnmin0-$ ritish Relics fauni nt 

 Jftax at*, gorrftcster. 



at the Dorchester Meeting, 1884 ; omitted from the volume 

 of tlwt date.) 



By Mr. THOMAS HARDY. 



HAVE been asked to give an account of a few 

 relics of antiquity lately uncovered in digging the 

 foundations of a house at Max Gate, in Fordington 

 Field. But, as the subject of archaeology is one 

 to a great extent foreign to my experience, my 

 sole right to speak upon it at all, in the presence 

 of the professed antiquarians around, lies in the fact that I am one 

 of the only two persons who saw most of the remains in situ, just 

 as they were laid bare, and before they were lifted up from their 

 rest of, I suppose, fifteen hundred years. Such brief notes as I 

 have made can be given in a few words. Leaving the town by the 

 south-eastern or Wareham Road we come first, as I need hardly 

 observe, to the site of the presumably great Romano-British 

 cemetery upon Fordington Hill. Proceeding along this road to a 

 further distance of half-a-mile, we reach the spot on which the 

 relics lay. It is about fifty yards back from the roadside, and 

 practically a level, bearing no immediate evidence that the natural 

 contour of the surface lias ever been disturbed more deeply than 

 by tin- plough. But though no barrow or other eminence rises there 



