Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 3.djvu/146

124 presented a great variety of form and pattern, and indeed it may be almost added, of material. Very many were of dusky blueish hue, supposed to be produced by some process in the burning; some coarse, thick and pale, and painted internally in concentric circles of a red colour; others, on the contrary, very thin, dark, and glazed on the outside, and elegantly marked, as if with a graving tool, something in the style of a British urn, only infinitely better. Fragments of a cinerary urn were found, (such an one probably as Hearne's earthen pot), pieces of which being observed to correspond, have since been cemented together, and are sufficient to give an idea of what it must have been, when perfect. It appears to have borne in some degree the shape of that engraved in Tab. xv. No. 24. of Plot's Oxfordshire, but had no foot, and stood on a plain bottom, which was not less than ten inches in diameter: the height, perhaps, was nearly the same, and the mouth seven or eight inches across. It was thin, but strong; visibly marked on the outside by the action of flame, and contained red earth or ashes, mixed with many pieces of some white substance, perhaps bone, all of which had obviously been burnt. Fragments of Roman tiles, of all kinds, were very numerous; none of them, indeed, in situ, as they were set by the mason, but some had still mortar adhering to them; and in one spot were the traces of a circular furnace or fireplace, about four feet in diameter, which might have been used for supplying hot air to apartments. Not far above it was a well in good preservation, about twenty feet deep; which being cleared out, afforded nothing more interesting than the bones of many horses and dogs; and lower again, was a smith's shop, as was conjectured from a heap of cinders and many keys found there. Mixed up with other remains were bones and antlers of deer, horns of oxen, bones of pigs, portions of vessels turned in stone, a stone much broken appearing to have belonged to a hand-mill, and frequent fragments of iron slag, or the refuse of an iron foundry; a substance also observed at Drunshill, near Woodeaton, in the neighbourhood, where again the Romans have been, as is attested by many remains of their pottery, and by a brass coin of Vespasian, in good preservation, which was picked up there in 1841. The coins found at Woodperry have been nearly all in second, with one or two in third, brass ; and were of Domitian, Hadrian, Diocletian, Maximian, Constantine,