In making the Oldham Park, a number of copper coins from the period of Antoninus Pius (A.D. 135) to Victorinus (A.D. 218) were found, and in 1887, during the excavations made for Chamber Mill, near the site of the road, a box was unearthed which contained 300 bronze and brass coins. The following were verified: Antoninus Pius (A.D. 135-161), Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161-180), Commodus (A.D. 180-193), Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211), Caracalla (A.D. 211-217), Julia Mamica (A.D. 222-235).[18] Before referring to the other roads from Manchester to the North and to the West, it will be well to glance at the Mancunium of the Romans, and it is needless, perhaps, here to remark that the building of the modern Manchester and Salford must of necessity have almost obliterated every material trace of this ancient stronghold. Somewhere about the time of Agricola (A.D. 78-85), or possibly a little earlier, the Romans erected a _castrum_ on a tongue of land made by a bend of the river Medlock. Whitaker, the Manchester historian,[19] thus describes what remained of this in 1773: The eastern side, like the western, is an hundred and forty [yards] in length, and for eighty yards from the northern termination the nearly perpendicular rampart carries a crest of more than two [yards] in height. It is then lowered to form the great entrance, the _porta prætoria_, of the camp: the earth there running in a ridge, and mounting up to the top of the bank, about ten in breadth. Then, rising gradually as the wall falls away, it carries an height of more than three for as many at the south-eastern angle. And the whole of this wall bears a broken line of thorns above, shews the mortar peeping here and there under the coat of turf, and near the south-eastern corner has a large buttress of earth continued for several yards along it. The southern side, like the northern, is an hundred and seventy-five [yards] in length; and the rampart, sinking immediately from its elevation at the eastern end, successively declines, till, about fifty yards off, it is reduced to the inconsiderable height of less than one [yard]. And about seventeen [yards] further there appears to have been a second gateway, the ground rising up to the crest of the bank for four or five at the point....