[Sidenote: TAB. XLIV.] Hence I continued my journey along the Foss, which I observed paved with the original work in many parts: it is composed of the flat quarry-stones of the country, of a good breadth, laid edgewise, and so close that it looks like the side of a wall fallen down, and through the current of so many ages is not worn through: a glorious and useful piece of industry, and, to our shame, not imitated; for small reparation from time to time would have preserved it intire, and where it is so much wanted in a dirty country. As I rode, on my left hand I saw the pleasant view of Montacute hill, a copped round eminence incompassed at bottom with a broad verge of wood, so that it looks like a high-crowned hat with a fringed hat-band: here has been a castle and chapel at top, and below it a religious house built by the earl of Moriton in the time of William the Conqueror.[133] Another hill near it, much of the same figure. Between them and the Foss, upon the same hilly ridge, is a Roman camp called Hamden hill, with a double ditch about it; to which leads a vicinal Roman way from the Foss through Stoke. The Foss is very plain and strait hither, and to Petherton bridge near South Petherton, once the palace of king Ina: here was formerly a wooden bridge, but ruinous, where two children were drowned, as they say; whereupon their parents rebuilt it of stone, and caused their _effigies_ to be cut upon a stone which lies at the foot of the bridge. In a field not far off, two years ago a pot full of Roman coin, to the quantity of six pecks, was dug up. Beyond this the Foss grows intricate and obscure, from the many collateral roads made through the badness and want of reparation in the true one; yet it seems to run through Donington, which stands on a very high hill, and, when mounted, presents us with a vast scene of Devonshire. I suppose this Foss went on the east side of Chard, and so by Axminster and Culliton, to Seaton or _Moridunum_, where properly it begins; whence if we measure its noble length to the sea-coast in Lincolnshire, at Grimsby or Saltfleet, where I imagine it ends, it amounts to 250 Roman miles in a strait line from north-east to south-west. Your lordship presented me with an oyster, found a little northward of Axminster, where the very fish appears petrified with its cartilaginous concretion to the shell, all in their proper colours. [Sidenote: +Chard.+]