all combine to render it the favourite and constant resort of the inhabitant, and a principal attraction to the stranger. The ground was laid out and planted in 1791, during the mayoralty of Henry Jenks, Esq., by Mr. Wright, a celebrated and intelligent nursery-man, resident in the adjacent village of Bicton. On the west side of the Quarry, in the Dingle, called the Dry Dingle, are the remains of a rude amphitheatre, with ascending seats cut in the bank, where the Friars of the adjacent Convent performed the ancient religious Mysteries, or Miracle-plays, so famous in the days of our ancestors. Here, also, during the reign of Elizabeth many plays were exhibited in which the scholars of the Free Schools sustained the principal characters. Close adjoining to the Quarry are THE AUSTIN FRIARS, of which the only remnant is the lower part of a square red stone building, probably the refectory, with two pointed doorways, and the bases of a range of handsome windows. We find these friars here as early as the year 1235, when they obtained from Henry III. a grant of a spot of ground outside the walls, which had been used as a burial-place when the kingdom was under an interdict, in the reign of King John. Upon this small space they erected their chapel and buildings, which they were enabled to enlarge and extend in the year 1295, by the piety of Geoffrey Randolf, a burgess of the town, who granted them a contiguous plot of ground for that purpose. At subsequent periods various portions of the lands in the immediate neighbourhood of the convent were successively added to their precinct. The corporation also were not wanting in frequent and liberal contributions to these, as well as to the other friars of the town. Still they never appear to have been either rich or numerous, and at the Dissolution their buildings were in a most deplorable state of ruin, inhabited only by a dissolute Prior, and two Friars not of the foundation, who had greatly and disgracefully wasted the conventual property. In 1403, several persons of note, who fell at Battlefield, are said to have found interment in the cemetery of this convent. [Picture: St. Chad’s Church]