A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE 



of broad flat stones let into one another and paved at the bottom with 

 bricks set edgewise. A bank in the vicarage garden, some yards out- 

 side the eastern rampart, was examined in 1873-4 and yielded a few 

 flints, ashes, animals' bones and horns, and many potsherds, both Samian 

 (one piece SAMOGENI, broken at the end) and ruder wares, and a 

 piece with a rich brown glaze. Below the bank was a square ' well ' at 

 least 1 2 feet deep, built of rough, squarish slabs placed edgeways one over 

 the other. The whole seems to represent a rubbish heap and perhaps a 

 disused well, adapted, as often, to the receipt of rubbish. 1 In addition to 

 these traces of building, stray potsherds and coins and other small objects 

 have been found freely round the ' station,' to such an extent as to show 

 that the inhabitation in Roman times extended for some distance outside 

 the ramparts, though the houses may have been nothing more substantial 

 than huts of wood or mud. Remains have been found even on the west 

 bank of the river, where Darley Grove once stood. 



Hardly more is known of 

 the burial places. Stukeley 

 mentions graves between the 

 ' station ' and the river. A 

 small jar of reddish-brown clay, 

 decorated with little pellets of 

 slip and rilled with burnt bones 

 and bits of bronze ornaments, 

 was found outside the east 

 rampart. 2 A skeleton, imagined 

 to have been originally in- 

 terred in armour, was unearthed 

 on Little Chester Green, south 

 of the ' station,' in September 

 1824, but no reason whatever 

 exists for calling this Roman. 3 

 When Darley Grove, west of 



the Derwent, was broken up in 1820, skeletons, Roman coins, and other 

 remains were noted.* There are also records of burials within the 

 ramparts, 6 but these may safely be put aside as not Roman. 



The smaller remains found in and near the ' station ' are abundant 

 and ordinary. Among the pottery is much Samian, including embossed 

 bowls probably dating from the second or early third century. 6 The piece 

 with a rich brown glaze, accepted as Romano-British by Sir A. W. 

 Franks, may form one of the rare specimens of Roman glazed ware. 7 



1 Free. See. Antiq. vi. 120 ; Derb. Arch. Journ. vii. 77. Watkin explained the things as belonging 

 to a botontlnus and an area fnalls. But the theory of ancient surveying to which these land-marks 

 belong is more than doubtful ; and Franks' explanation as a rubbish heap seems certainly the safer. 



2 Jewitt, Intellectual Observer, xii. 349, with figure. 



3 Derby Mercury, 22 September, 1824, Glover, History, 1829, i. 295, with figure, and other writers. 



4 Glover, History, \. 293, note. 



6 See, for example, Pilkington, View of the present State of Derbyshire (1789), ii. 198. 



6 Derb. Arch. Journ. x. 159, plate vi.; xi. 82 ; Reliquary, i. plate 25. 



7 Proc. Soc. Antiq. vi. 120. 



218 



FIG. 25. PAINTED COMMON WARE FOUND AT LITTLE 

 CHESTER. (Derbyshire Archceohgjcal Journal^ 



