Itinerarium curiosum (centuria I) : $b or, an account of the antiquities, and remarkable curiosities in nature or art, observed in travels through Great BritainStukeley, William
History
Itinerarium curiosum (centuria I) : $b or, an account of the antiquities, and remarkable curiosities in nature or art, observed in travels through Great Britain
Stukeley, William
Great Britain -- Antiquities -- Early works to 1800; Great Britain -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800
From Newberry the Roman road (I believe coming from Silchester) passes
east and west to Marlborough, the Roman _Cunetio_,[47] named from the
river. This town consists chiefly of one broad and strait street, and
for the most part upon the original ground-plot; nor does it seem
unlikely that the narrow piazza continued all along the sides of the
houses is in imitation of them: the square about the church in the
eastern part one may imagine the site of a temple fronting this street:
to the south are some reliques of a priory: the gate-house is left: on
the north has been another religious house, whereof the chapel remains,
now turned into a dwelling-house. Where now is the seat of my lord
Hartford was the site of the Roman _castrum_, for they find foundations
and Roman coins; I saw one of Titus in large brass: but towards the
river, and without my lord’s garden-walls, is one angle of it left
very manifestly, the rampart and ditch intire: the road going over the
bridge cuts it off from the limits of the present castle: the ditch
is still twenty foot broad in some part: it passed originally on the
south of the summer-house, and so along the garden-wall, where it makes
the fence, to the turn of the corner: the mark of it is still apparent
broader than the ditch, which has been repaired since, but of narrower
dimension: then I suppose it went through the garden by the southern
foot of the mount, and round the house through the court-yard, where
I have marked the track thereof with pricked lines in Plate 62. There
is a spring in the ditch, so that the foss of the _castrum_ was always
full of water. I suppose it to have been five hundred Roman feet square
within, and the Roman road through the present street of Marlborough
went by the side of it. Afterward, in Saxon or Norman times, they built
a larger castle, upon the same ground, after their model, and took in
more compass for the mount; which obliged the road to go round it with
a turn, till it falls in again on the west side of the mount at the
bounds of Preshute parish. Roman coins have been found in shaping the
mount; which was the keep of the later castle, and now converted into
a pretty spiral walk, on the top of which is an octagonal summer-house
represented Tab. I. This neighbouring village, Preshute, has its name
from the meadows the church stands in, which are very low: in the
windows upon a piece of glass is written, DNS RICHARDUS HIC VICARIUS,
who I believe lived formerly in a little house at Marlborough,
over-against the castle, now an ale-house, where his name is cut in
wood in the same old letters over the door.
[Sidenote: +Leucomagus.+]
[Sidenote: TAB. LXIV.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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