Page:Roman Manchester (1900) by Charles Roeder.djvu/27

Rh the south, extending betwixt the bank and the channel of a rill to the north-west of the Roman suburb. Whitaker adds (page 27): "This lately continued so bad a morass that even in the dry summer of 1765 horses sank up to the belly in it."

I may now proceed to the rather intricate question of the set of ditches which were placed along the line of the northern wall.

In order to fully understand the character of their structure I have prepared a plan which shows at a glance the work done during the railway excavations in 1897–8 in that direction. Ten double trenches were made along the wall, and in addition to this the whole area now covered by the new police station, in Bridgewater Street, has been more or less excavated for foundations. I have followed operations almost daily while the work has been in progress; personally examining, measuring, and collecting all the time, and noting the physical features of the successive strata penetrated until the rock was reached. It proved a tough piece of work, and the labour has been great to unriddle satisfactorily the real nature of the northern defences. It must be understood that there was not a single trench that exhibited in unbroken succession the original arrangement. Since the beginning of last century the ground has been interfered with incessantly for the erection of streets and yards, part has been excavated for gravel or for tipping rubbish, and the subsoil has been redisturbed for sinking drains and culverts, and it is only by piecing up shreds of untouched patches here and there that I have been enabled, in a manner, to reconstruct a running section from the point of the northern wall across Bridgewater Street to Worsley Street. As the trenches were made at an angle of 45 degrees to the course of the