Roman Mining Operations on the Borders of Wales. 297 



to one of their mines, which still remains on the site of the 

 Great Doward. They had excavated a large cavern into the 

 side of the hill, and wherever they came npon the vein of iron 

 ore, they followed it into the heart of the mountain. Thus from 

 the cavern, as it still exists, rude galleries run in more than one 

 direction, leading to successions of chambers made by the ex- 

 traction of the iron ore. The entrances from the outer cave are 

 now much clogged up, but they are said to have been entered 

 and explored to a great depth underground. They are, as is 

 frequently the case with such remains, the subject of many 

 popular legends of fairies which dwell in them, hidden treasures, 

 and the like, and the entrance cavern is called in the locahty 

 " King Arthur's Hall." On the adjacent Little Doward there 

 is an ancient entrenched inclosure, which had probably some 

 connection with the mines. 



The Romans had, in this district, another method of 

 mining, or rather a modification of the same, which was 

 caused by the character of the ground. It is seen to 

 most advantage in the neighbourhood of Coleford, on the 

 Monmouth side of the Forest of Dean. Coleford is reached 

 most easily from Monmouth, through a country of moun- 

 tain and forest of the greatest beauty. It is situated upon 

 the same mountain limestone which here skirts the Forest of 

 Dean, and in which the iron ore is found; but here, as the 

 ground lies more level, and cannot be entered from the side of 

 a hill, the Romans began their operations] by sinking a large 

 pit — in some cases these pits are from twenty to thirty feet in 

 diameter — and when at the bottom of this pit they came upon a 

 vein of ore, they followed it just as they did the veins from the cave 

 in the Great Doward. These pits as they now remain are popu- 

 larly called scoivles, a word the origin or meaning of which I 

 have not been able to discover. They have, as may be sup- 

 posed, rendered the ground on which they are situated very 

 uneven, and unfit for cultivation ; it is thus always overgrown 

 with copse and brushwood, and it requires some care on the 

 part of the explorer not to fall unawares into a pit. They are 

 seen to most advantage not far from a farm house, called, from 

 them, the Scowles Farm, about a mile to the westward of 

 Coleford. In one of these scowles which I examined, the 

 round pit, was nearly twenty feet deep, at which depth the 

 Romans had come upon a vein of ore, which they had followed 

 by a shaft, the entrance to which looks now something like 

 the mouth of a large oven. Without a light, and the other 

 necessary accoutrements of a miner, it was not advisable to 

 «nter beyond a few feet ; but a stone thrown in could be 

 heard rolling down for some seconds; and the cottagers stated 

 that some of these mines extended two or three hundred feet 



