Dorchester derives its name from the ancient Roman name of Durnovaria, and Thomas Hardy has transferred part of this Latinity in writing of Fordington as "Durnover" in his novels. Close to the London and South-Western Railway station, on the Weymouth Road, is a field, now a municipal pleasure ground, containing what is called Maumbury Rings--a large, oval, grassy mound, curved like a horseshoe. This great earthen ring, which it is estimated would hold 10,000 spectators, is supposed to be the work of prehistoric man, adapted by the Romans to the purposes of an amphitheatre. Extensive excavations were carried on in the amphitheatre by the British Archæological Association and the Dorset Field Club during five summers--1908, 1909, 1910, 1912 and 1913--and among many interesting finds by the archæologists' spade must be mentioned the oblong cave at the east end, probably for the confinement of beasts, prehistoric shafts in which picks of red-deer antlers, worked flints, etc., were found, sundry human skeletons interred, and a well of the Civil War period, during which the symmetrical terraces were apparently added to the original ancient banks. A crowd of 10,000 people is said to have been gathered upon it at the execution of Mary Channing, the wife of a grocer at Dorchester, who was strangled and burnt in the arena for poisoning her husband in 1705. The Via Iceniana or Icknield Street came out of Wiltshire by Blandford to Dorchester and strikes on towards the west by Eggerdun Hill, about ten miles from the town, where it is clearly marked. A Roman road went from Dorchester to Ilchester, by Bradford and Stratton, so called as the Stret-tun, the village on the Roman stratum or road. "It is impossible," writes Mr Hardy, "to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town, fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent, unobtrusive rest for one thousand five hundred years. He was mostly found lying on his side, in an oval scoop in the chalk, like a chicken in its shell, his knees drawn up to his chest, sometimes with the remains of his spear against his arm, a fibula or brooch of bronze on his breast or forehead, an urn at his knees, a jar at his throat, a bottle at his mouth, and mystified conjecture poring down upon him from the eyes of boys and men who had turned to gaze at the familiar spectacle as they passed on." In the excavations made when Mr Hardy's house at Max Gate was commenced graves were discovered, of which Mr Hardy wrote: "In two of them, and I believe in a third, a body lay on its right side, the knees being drawn up to the chest and the arm extended downwards, so that the hand rested against the ankles. Each body was fitted with, one may almost say, perfect accuracy into the oval hole, the crown of the head touching the maiden chalk at one end and the toes at the other, the tight-fitting situation being strongly suggestive of the chicken in the egg-shell."