The Ruins of the Roman City of Uriconium, at Wroxeter, near ShrewsburyWright, Thomas
History
The Ruins of the Roman City of Uriconium, at Wroxeter, near Shrewsbury
Wright, Thomas
Romans -- England -- Wroxeter; Wroxeter (England) -- Antiquities, Roman
During the month of May, 1859, the work of the excavators was
interrupted; when it was resumed, they proceeded to explore the building
to which these hypocausts belonged, beginning from the side of the field
adjoining to the Watling Street Road,—that is, from the side of one of
the main streets of the old Roman town,—and they found walls in the line,
or nearly in the line, of the western wall of the great public building
just described. Another street has since been discovered to the south,
running east and west, parallel to that met with to the north of the
buildings first excavated. The excavations have since that time been
followed in various parts of the two acres first inclosed by the
Excavation Committee, and a large extent of ruins is now laid open. But
I will here interrupt my narrative, while I give an account of the
general character of the buildings, the ruins of which have already been
brought to light.
* * * * *
As yet, the excavations on the site of Uriconium have not been carried
far enough to enable us to form any idea of the general distribution of
the Roman town, but it is evident that the buildings on which the
excavators are employed were inclosed by three main streets, crossing at
right angles, forming a square mass. It has been stated that the few
discoveries hitherto made as to the character of the streets in the Roman
towns in Britain would lead us to think that they were little more than
narrow alleys, but this was certainly not the case with these three
streets of Roman Uriconium, which seem to have been fine wide streets,
and in the one to the north, the pavement of small round stones appears
to have occupied only the middle part of the street, designed probably
for carriages and horses. A tolerably wide space on each side seems, as
far as can be traced, to have been unpaved. But, although we have as yet
made little advance towards discovering the general character of
Uriconium as a city, and the manner in which the houses were distributed
over the Roman town, we had found sufficient fragments of different kinds
to give us a tolerable notion of the houses themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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