Page:VCH Northamptonshire 1.djvu/270

 A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE particular it is credible enough that a Roman road connected Leicester and Huntingdon. It cannot however be called by any means certain. The line of a Roman road can be traced clearly enough for fifteen miles from Leicester along the ' Gartree Way ' to the Roman site at Medbourne, on the limit of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, and some existing roads and boundaries warrant the conjecture that this road ran on in the same straight line from Medbourne eight miles towards Stanion. In the centre of our county all traces fail, but on its eastern edge a lane which runs due east from Titchmarsh towards the Roman road at Alconbury in Huntingdonshire has been noted as possibly Roman. The whole is a slender chain of evidence with a great gap in the middle and weak links at the end. But it deserves note as a possibility. (4) Two other Roman roads, partly coinciding, have been alleged to cross our county. The one is said to go from Borough Hill by Chipping Warden to the Roman site at Alchester in Oxfordshire, the other from Dow Bridge on Watling Street by Borough Hill and Chipping Warden to the Portway north of Oxford. Neither has the least support in facts. They appear to have been suggested to various writers, partly by some details in Richard of Cirencester's forged Itinerary, partly by the belief that Borough Hill and Chipping Warden were the sites of large towns, and partly by the idea that ' Portway ' denotes a Roman road. All three reasons are of course worthless. 5. Industries : The Castor Potteries We have now described the normal features of Roman Northampton- shire, that is, the features of settled Romano-British civilization — towns, villas, roads — which characterize this county equally with any other ordinary part of southern, non-military Britain. There remains a feature which obviously belongs to the settled civilization of the district but which is somewhat peculiar to it. This feature is supplied by one or perhaps two industries, some uncertain traces of iron workings and some unquestionable remains of extensive potteries. Of the iron workings there is little to tell. Ironstone lies accessible near the surface in many parts of the county, and slag, taken to be the refuse of iron workings, has been noted in connexion with Roman remains near Oundle, Rockingham, Laxton, KingsclifFe, Bulwick and Wansford.' But none of these sites has ever been seriously examined except Wansford, and the Wansford finds are not satisfactory. Mr. Artis thought that he there detected considerable ironworks. But he has left no details on record except a drawing of an alleged smelting furnace (see his plate xxv.), and this, as Mr. Gowland has pointed out to me, has nothing to do with ironworking at all, but perhaps belongs to a potter's apparatus. While therefore our evidence makes it not im- probable that the Northamptonshire ironstone was worked in the Roman period, it does not justify the confident assertions usually made to that effect. 206
 * See the alphabetical index at the end of this article.