CORRESPONDENCE. 
218 
of " clay aslies " as are seen in tlie " staddles " or " straddles," wliere 
bricks are burnt in the present day in the marsli. I never myself, how- 
ever, could discern a single piece of charred wood, however minute, or of 
coal, or any cinders, or any indication of vegetable matter acted upon by 
fire. I have an idea that the fuel used may have been straw or dried 
grass. Nothing was turned up of the nature of metal, coins, or tools; 
there were several drop-like pieces of a dark blue, almost black, glaze, 
transparent ; the tooth of a horse ; one of the tarsal bones of an ox or cow ; 
two or three imperfect bones, probably of sheep ; the remains of hazel- 
trees and willows, on the same level as the bricks : also, on the same level, 
cockle-shells, as though in their native bed ; single o_yster-shells ; and, in 
one place, land-snail shells, as fresh and brilliant in colour as any now in a 
hedgerow. 
In some few cases the hand-bricks are vitrified and hard; those that 
are not (constituting the great bulk of what I turned up) vary in colour 
from a light yellow-red to a dark black-red, and all seem more or less to 
have chopped grass or hay mixed with them. They vary in size ; the 
smaller are near to Orby, the larger to the seacoast ; the small ones are 
very friable and easily crumble. Flat pieces of pot-like fioor-tiling exist, 
bearing the impress of grass on both sides, and seem to have formed a 
floor on which the props rested to support the pottery. Many of the 
bricks show a flat surface at one end, whilst the other end, that rested 
against the pot, is slightly hollow; there are other pieces of pot, of the 
use of which I could form no opinion. These relics of the Eomans lie at 
very little more than a foot below the surface in Orby, at the pomt most 
distant from the sea ; at other places they are three, four, five, six, and 
even close upon seven feet under the present marsh-level. 
The superincumbent warp forms the rich marsh-grazing district of 
Lincolnshire. When examined, it can be split up into flakes, indicative of 
its being a tidal deposit, exactly like the warp left by the Trent and Ouse 
(Yorkshire) in the present day. I did not see a single freshwater or 
inarine shell in the hody of the warp ; but when it is pierced through, a well- 
defined surface is reached having sea- shells upon it, and this surface was 
doubtless the Iloman level. 
I do not possess sufficient geological lore to reason firml}^ on the fact I 
have next to state ; but the professed geologist ill perhaps at once ex- 
plain my difficulty. The first digging I ever made was in a field in Orby, 
the property of Mr. Stainton, of Dolby, called " the far ten acre." At 
about four feet we reached the bed of hand-bricks and debris, which were 
found to rest on a fine blue, plastic, saponaceous-like clay, into which a 
!)ole was thrust for three or four feet with ease. This clay must certainly 
lave been the level of the district in the time of the Romans, for the hand- 
bricks lie upon it ; it must, therefore, have been deposited hcfore the 
Romans came to England, at all events before they made pottery on its 
surface, and very possibly out of its substance. If this clay is a sea 
deposit, which I take it to be, how comes it that the sea deposited a blue 
.clay before the Eomans came to Lincolnshire ; and aftc7' they had left this 
country, when the banks gave way and the sea again submerged the 
Iloman level, a. yellow-hroicn warp, a very widely different substance from 
the blue clay, was left behind by the very same sea? Can any supposition 
of the blue clay being a freshwater deposit clear this up P Any such sup- 
position appears to me to militate against the received, and I think the 
true idea, that the sea (not fresh \^ ater) once covered the Roman level, 
and that it was the sea, and not fresh water, that was embanked out by 
the Romans. 
