Page:Roman Manchester (1900) by Charles Roeder.djvu/170

 towards the south-west on a little rocky ridge, within the elbow of two low-banked confluent rivers, a site, in fact, well adapted and generally preferred by the Romans for the erection of their camps. No trace whatever of any anterior British occupation has come to light in the past, or during the latter extensive excavations at and around Castlefield in 1897–1900. The only discoveries consist in some sporadic finds of a flint scraper, a barbed arrow-head on the north side of the castrum, a stone hammer of gritstone at Throstle Nest (in Whitaker's time), and a large flint core at the river level in Ordsal Lane, all of which more directly point to the presence here of some earlier aboriginal people, but indications of British ditches or stockades or pottery are wanting.

On its western and northern side, as I have shown before, the ground was of a swampy and marshy nature and little suited to British defence, and Hulme, at its south, was a low and mossy holm, exposed to frequent river floods. When we come, however, to the rocky cliff of Hunt's Bank, towards which the levels continually increase, we are on different ground, and at Cateaton Street the level rises to 118 feet, a site which offers certain natural advantages of primitive defence.

We know that the Britons were in the habit of preferably selecting hills and more inaccessible eminences for their duns; round these they drew their ditches and stockades. We have seen that the northern rocky ledge, now covered by Chetham College, is traversed on the south side by a long-drawn rock-cut fosse, which swept in a curve to the Grammar School, and further strengthened by the natural double-defence of Hanging Ditch gully and its artificial prolongation terminating in the latter Toad Lane or Todd Street. This additional cordon formed a complete outer circle.