A strong piece of iron is soldered into it with lead, for the purpose of attaching something to the building externally. A little alley, considerably wider than the spaces between the pillars of bricks, ran across this hypocaust, and through an opening in the wall, into another hypocaust, which was entered from without by a large archway, and this again was approached by a flight of three steps, each step composed of one large well-squared stone, descending from a square platform, which was apparently on a level with the original floors of the rooms. When the steps were uncovered, a broken shaft of a large column was found lying across them. The platform at the bottom of the steps, or at least the corner of it farthest from the arched entrance to the hypocaust, seems to have been used by the last occupiers of this building as a receptacle for the dust swept from floors and passages, for the earth, for about a foot deep on the floor, was literally filled with coins, hair-pins, fibulæ, broken pottery and glass, bones of birds and animals which had been eaten, and a variety of other such objects. To the east of the entrance to the hypocausts, a small room only eight feet square was found, which had a herring-bone pavement like that of the great inclosure to the north of the Old Wall. A rather wide passage through the eastern wall of this small room led into another room with a hypocaust, the floor of which is also gone. The pillars of this hypocaust were rather more neatly constructed, but they seem to have been considerably lower than those of the hypocausts previously opened. This hypocaust was the scene of a very interesting discovery. Abundant traces of burning in all parts of the site leave no doubt that the city of Uriconium was plundered, and afterwards burnt by some of the barbarian invaders of Roman Britain at the close of the Romano-British period, that is, towards the middle of the fifth century. The human remains which have been met with in different parts, bear testimony to a frightful massacre of the inhabitants. It would seem that a number of persons had been pursued to the buildings immediately to the south of the line of the Old Wall, and slaughtered there; for in trenching across what were perhaps open courts to the south and south-east of the door through the continuation of the Old Wall, remains of at least four or five skeletons were found, and in what appears to have been a corner of a yard, outside the semicircular end of the hypocaust first discovered, lay the skull and some of the bones of a very young child. In the last of the hypocausts we have been describing, three skeletons were found, that of a person who appears to have died in a crouching position in one of the corners, and two others stretched on the ground by the side of the wall. An examination of the skull of the person in the corner leaves no room for doubting that he was a very old man. One at least of the others was a female.