Page:VCH Northamptonshire 1.djvu/220

 A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE and contains the usual furnace, hypocausts and hot rooms and cold baths (Artis, pi. v., vi.). The partially explored buildings are : five rooms of a house north of the church (pi. ii.,xi.) ; a structure which Artis very rashly called a temple (xi.) east of the church ; and six rooms w^ith two hypo- causts and a mosaic pavement of plain but graceful geometrical pattern — interlacing lines of white, yellow, blue and red (pi. viii., iii., iv.). Two other mosaics are figured by Artis from buildings of which he gives no details. One is a plain pattern in straight lines of yellow, white and dark, grey, found on the north side of the churchyard in 1827 (pi. vii.) ; the other is a more ambitious work in white, yellow, red and grey, in the centre a conventional flower with eight heart-shaped petals set in a square bordered with lozerxge devices and guilloches. This was found south-west of the church and removed to the ante-room of the dairy at Milton (pi. xii.). Imperfect as our knowledge is, we can see that the site of Castor village was once occupied by substantial Romano-British dwelling-houses fitted with all the usual comforts. Lesser finds of port- able objects have not been minutely recorded, but they are of the usual character — coins of all dates, pottery and the like.^ We have now described the two chief sites, one on each side of the Nene, in the area which we are discussing. It remains to describe the more scattered habitations within the same area which we provision- ally styled suburbs. These are dwellings or groups of dwellings which are too near together and too near to Castor and the Castles to be classed as separate villas in the fourth section of this chapter. We shall take first those which are best known, referring to the map for geographical order (fig. 4, p. 168). (i) Mill Hill or Mill Field, about a quarter of a mile north-east from the Castles, across the Nene. Here Morton and Stukeley recog- nized Roman buildings, and Artis in 1822 excavated an area of 70 by 100 yards. He found four buildings, or parts of buildings, arranged unsymmetrically (fig. 6). The easternmost of the four may have been a house of the corridor type. A room at its north end contained an elaborate mosaic in red, white, yellow and gray — a geometrical pattern with a cup in the centre, framed in an octagon and that again in a square with considerable intricacy of device. Next to it was a room with a simpler but far more successful mosaic of rather unusual design — circles and semicircles worked in red on a stone-coloured ground (fig. 7). The next building to it may have been a detached bathhouse ; it measured 25 by 67 feet and contained seven rooms, the two largest heated by hypocausts and a third floored with plain tessellation, while the smallest room of all, at the south corner, was approached by steps descending to it. Of the third building discovered, too little probably is known to justify comment; the fourth, 60 by 170 feet with a hypocaust at the north end and two plainly tessellated floors, may 1 Roman vestiges are still visible in the village — cores of walling, built herringbone fashion, in two or three lanes ; columns in the north wall of the chancel of the church ; tiles, etc. 172