LITTLE CHESTER.
[TAB. LXXV.]We saw the castrum here, of a square figure, hanging on a precipice over a little river on the south side of the Roman road, and at some distance from the Wall: it had been walled about, as others: great vestigia of buildings, altars, carved stones and antiquities innumerable, have been found here, but now dispersed and gone. We saw the mouths of vaults with great stones lying over them. The fences of the pastures are made of the stones of the castle-wall. The man who lives here showed us a few fragments of Roman work; a pine-apple, which had been a pinacle on the top of a circular tholus; a piece of an inscription within a civic garland, finely cut; a brick, with LEG. VI. V. He has found many coins; but his children threw them away.
In a corner of a field below, by the side of the brook, and as the military way turns, up the hill, is another such milliary stone, but no inscription legible.
The moory country hereabouts has coal under it. Upon the tops of the hills are several cairns, or sepulchral heaps of stones, made by the old Britons.
A little eastward of Great Chester, where the ditch ends, at the bottom of a cliff, we saw the foundation of the Wall, which the country people are digging up for building: we measured the true breadth of it, just seven Roman feet.