Near is Ashridge, an abbey, now the seat of the duke of Bridgewater; a park finely wooded, especially with tall beech-trees full of mast. Hereabouts I observed many great stones composed wholly of little pebbles; others, of larger pebbles or flints petrified together exceeding hard. Near Ricmeresworth, at Moor park, Mr. Styles, digging a hill away, found veins of sea-sand with mussels in them, and many other curious particulars. [Sidenote: +Verolanium.+] [Sidenote: TAB. XCV.] [Sidenote: TAB XXX XXXI.] We come again into the Watling-street at _Verolanium_. I need say little here, after Mr. Camden, Chancey, Weaver, and others. This was the famous _municipium_ of the Romans, destroyed by Boadicia. The form of the city is depicted in plate 95. in one part the ditch is double, but irregularly formed. I imagine the outermost was the only fence of the first city, which Boadicia destroyed before the walls were built, and these reduced it into a more square form; to which the inner ditch belonged. In some measure the track of the streets is visible, when the corn first comes up, or is nearly ripe: three years ago good part of the wall was standing; but ever since, out of wretched ignorance, even of their own interest, they have been pulling it up all around, to the very foundations, to mend the highway; and I met hundreds of cart-loads of Roman bricks, &c. carrying for that purpose, as I now rode through the old city, though they may have stone cheaper, because of the prodigious strength of the mortar, so that they cannot get up one whole brick in a thousand. The composition of the Roman wall is three foot layers of flint, and one foot made up of three courses of Roman brick: there are round holes quite through the wall, at about eight yards distance, in that corner still left by St. German’s chapel: another great piece of the wall is left by the west gate, called Gorham Block; it is always twelve foot thick. I saw a little brass _lar_, or _genius alatus_; another curious antiquity, of a brass knife-handle with odd faces and figures on it, now in possession of Sir Robert Cornwall, baronet; a little urn of white earth two inches and quarter high: part of a great wine-jar, 20 inches high, two foot diameter, in St. Michael’s vestry; another such in St. Alban’s church. In St. Michael’s church sleeps the great naturalist Bacon, who first revived the experimental way of philosophy: his mansion-house or manor was at Gorhambury, hard by, where is a statue of Henry VIII. and several things worth seeing: it is now the seat of my lord Grimstone. Infinite are the antiquities of all sorts that have been, and frequently are, dug up at _Verolam_. When I was making an ichnography of it, I could have taken several pecks of remainders of Mosaic pavements out of a little ditch near St. German’s chapel; and there is one or two intire yet under ground. As you walk along the great road that runs north and south through the city from St.