296 Inaugural Address by the President of the Society, 



Mr. Green in the first page of his " Making- of England 99 : — " I 

 need scarcely say/' he says, " that I do not attempt to write a 

 history of Roman Britain. Such a history, indeed, can hardly be 

 attempted with any profit until the scattered records of researches 

 amongst the roads, villas, tombs, &c, of this period, have been in 

 some way brought together and made accessible, - " or, I may add, 

 until the researches have been made, which can hardly be said, as 

 yet, to have been done to the extent that is requisite. I have often 

 noticed in my younger sporting days, and it is a fact well known 

 to sportsmen, that some hounds are apt to give tongue before they 

 have got a true scent, whilst there are others whose voice can be 

 relied upon. I am an old dog, and have always had a disposition 

 to run mute; indeed I should not have spoken now if some of my 

 friends had not given me the whip, by placing me unworthily in 

 this chair. This must be my excuse for passing over with such 

 slight comment the observations of previous writers on the origin 

 and uses of Bokerly Dyke. I wished to approach the subject with 

 an unbiassed mind, and, convinced by the experience of a number of 

 years that the question could be proved by excavations, I determined, 

 on the first opportunity, to make the attempt. 



But in an entrenchment of such length it is quite uncertain 

 whether any relics can be found in a rampart unless the line happens 

 to pass over ground that had been occupied by a village or settlement 

 previously to the construction of the entrenchment, and no such 

 settlement presented itself to the eye of the observer on any part of 

 the line. I remained for some time in doubt, therefore, where to 

 begin, when, one day, towards the middle of 1888, Mr. Lawes, the 

 organist in Tollard Church, who is the conductor of my private band, 

 and who had acquired an interest in such matters by his visits to my 

 Museum at Farnham, Dorset, happening to pass along the dyke to the 

 south of the Salisbury Road near Woodyates, found the occupier of the 

 farm — Mr. Trowbridge — engaged in cutting into the dyke to obtain 

 soil for top-dressing his fields, and in so doing five copper coins 

 turned up, together with a Romano-British fibula, which Mr. Lawes 

 brought to me. They were Roman coins, extending from Trajan to 

 Constans, and had evidently come out of the dyke. I had already 



