Page:VCH Derbyshire 1.djvu/277

 ROMANO-BRITISH DERBYSHIRE and are principally important as indicating the existence of stone buildings with pillars and the like. One or two other pieces which might have been more noteworthy have disappeared. Pegge (p. 39) records a bust of Apollo and of another deity, and others mention a half-length or bust of a woman in gritstone with her arms folded across her breast. This was ploughed up in 1747, and is probably one of the two pieces seen by Pegge. It was sketched by John Wilson, but the sketch does not make its age or character very clear. 1 _ . j. . jj .1 T, ric. 15. STONE FIGURE. It remains to our description to add the Roman BROUGH. roads on which Brough stood. They are two. The Bathamgate ran up the Bradwell valley and thence across the moors to Buxton, and its stones remain to this day. The Doctor Gate and the Long Causeway two popular names for two parts of one road connected Melandra and Brough and Templeborough. But the exact approach of this route to the fort at Brough is uncertain (p. 250). Such are the details at present known concerning Roman Brough. They are plainly too scanty to permit us to write its history. But we can make the beginnings of a history. The fort was built or rebuilt about 158 A.D. in connexion with other steps taken to coerce the northern hill tribes, and at this time it was garrisoned by the Cohors I. Aquitanorum. Later on it was rebuilt or in some fashion altered. The monumental slab which recorded the work of 158 was broken up and its pieces used for flooring or for walls, and this is the sign of some considerable structural changes. We cannot, however, date these changes. Plainly they came many years after 158, and various probabilities unite to suggest the opening years of the third century. At that time there was much military activity and much rebuilding in Britain, and that not merely in the region of Hadrian's Wall. But further evidence can alone decide the question. What followed is still obscurer. The coins found in the vault, if they have been rightly attributed to the fourth century, tell us that the place was then not wholly uninhabited. But we cannot tell whether the inhabitants were soldiers or whether the fort had been dismantled earlier. One more historical item, concerning rather the district than the fort of Brough, may be gleaned from an inscription found at Foligno in Italy. It is on the tombstone of a man who, among other temporary posts, was censitor Brittonum Anaii'ion_ensium^ ' census officer of the Anavio- nensian Britons,' about 100 or no A.D. These Britons, as we shall see in the next paragraph, lived round Brough, and it is likely enough that the census taken of them about 100-110 was the first ever taken. It might, indeed, be one of the ordinary more or less periodic censuses, but in that case it would hardly have been worth mentioning on a tombstone. If, however, it was the first census of these particular Britons it would be 1 J. Whitaker, Hist, of Manchester, i. 143 ; Bray, p. 212 ; Wilson, in Bateman's Ten Tears' Digging, p. 252, with sketch here reproduced. The stone, according to Wilson, was 2 feet high and 18 inches broad. I 209 27