The site of Uriconium presents one great advantage to the antiquarian explorer, that only a small and not very important portion of the area has been exposed to the most destructive of all encroachments on its sanctity, modern buildings; while the situation and nature of the ground has not required the deep draining which would have cut through the ancient floors, and these lie too far beneath the surface to be touched by the plough. It will be easily understood that the preservation of such remains depends much on the depth of soil which covers them. The Rev. T. F. More has discovered and made considerable excavations in a very extensive and most interesting Roman villa, which occupies part of his beautiful park at Linley Hall, near Bishop’s Castle, but there the position of the site, and perhaps other circumstances, have caused the earth to accumulate much less rapidly, and the floors lay so near to the surface that they have all been destroyed. Where a fragment of the concrete of the floor remained, it was hardly six inches under the ground. Our means of observation have hitherto been so imperfect, that we can only form vague conjectures as to the internal aspect and distribution of the buildings of a Roman town in Britain. At the close of the Roman period the towns were usually, if not always, surrounded with defensive walls; but there are several reasons for believing that the Roman towns in this island were not walled until a comparatively late date, perhaps not till the domestic dissensions and foreign invasions of the fourth century. These town walls, when closely examined into, are often found to contain materials taken from older buildings of another kind, which older materials themselves present the debased style of architecture which belonged to the declining age of the Roman power. The long straggling line of wall which surrounded Uriconium as we may conclude from its very irregularity, can only have been built at a late date, after the city had gone on for ages increasing in its extent. We are naturally led to suppose that the public buildings would occupy the central, or at least the more elevated part of the town, and this has in several instances proved to be the case. The discoveries made by Sir Christopher Wren, seem to leave no doubt that a Roman temple occupied the site of the modern cathedral of St. Paul’s, in London. But buildings of all sorts would seem to have been mixed very confusedly together; for we believe that in London, more recent excavations have brought to light remains of potter’s kilns in close proximity to this temple. In one or two instances, as at Aldborough, in Yorkshire, (the Roman Isurium), and in some of the small towns on the line of Hadrian’s Wall, in Northumberland, masses of the small houses have been uncovered, and their appearance leads us to believe that the houses of a Roman town in Britain were grouped thickly together, that they were mostly separated by narrow