(xxi) A third house is supplied by Kent. This was found in June about six miles south of Gravesend, near the track from North Ash to Ash Church, on the farm of Mr. Geo. Day. Woodland was being cleared for an orchard, flint foundations were encountered, and the site was then explored by Mr. Jas. Kirk, Mr. S. Priest, and others of the Dartford Antiquarian Society, to whom I am indebted for information: the Society will in due course issue a full Report. The spade (fig. 13) revealed a rectangular walled enclosure of 53 × 104 feet. The entrance was at the east end; the dwelling-rooms (including a sunk bath, 7 feet square, lined with plaster) were, so far as traced, in the west and south-west portion; much of the walled space may have been farmyard or wooden sheds. Many bits of Samian and other pottery were found (among them a mortarium stamped MARTINVSF), and many oyster-shells. Other Romano-British foundations have been suspected close by.
The structure somewhat resembles the type of farm-house which might fairly be called, from its best-known example—the only one now uncovered to view—the Carisbrooke type.[7] That, however, usually has rooms at both ends, as in the Clanville example which I figure here as more perfect than the Carisbrooke one (fig. 14). One might compare the buildings at Castlefield, Finkley, and Holbury, which I have discussed in the Victoria History of Hants (i. 302-3, 312), and which were perhaps rudimentary forms of the Carisbrooke type.
(xxii) A few kindred items may be grouped here. Digging has been attempted in a Roman 'villa' at Litlington (Cambs.) but, as Prof. McKenny Hughes tells me, with little success. The 'beautifully tiled and marbled floors' are newspaper exaggeration. A 'Roman bath' which was stated to have been found early in 1914 at Kingston-on-Thames, in the work of widening the bridge, is declared by Mr. Mill Stephenson not to be Roman at all. Lastly, an excavation of an undoubted Roman house at Broom Farm, between Hambledon and Soberton in south-east Hants, projected by Mr. A. Moray Williams, was prevented by the war, which called Mr. Williams to serve his country.
(xxiii) Lowbury. During the early summer of 1914 Mr. D. Atkinson completed his examination of the interesting site of Lowbury, high amid the east Berkshire Downs. Of the results which he won in 1913 I gave some account last year (Report for 1913, p. 22); those of 1914 confirm and develop them. We may, then, accept the site as, at first and during the Middle Empire, a summer farm or herdsmen's shelter, and in the latest Roman days a refuge from invading English. Whether the wall which he traced round the little place was reared to keep in cattle or to keep out foes, is not clear; possibly enough, it served both uses. In all, Mr. Atkinson gathered about 850 coins belonging to all periods of the Empire but especially to the latest fourth century and including Theodosius, Arcadius, and Honorius. He also found over fifty brooches and a great amount of pottery—3 cwt., he tells me—which was mostly rough ware: there was little Samian (some of shape '37'), less Castor, and hardly any traces of mortaria. A notable find was the skeleton of a woman of 50 (ht. about 5 feet 9 inches), which he discovered in the trench dug to receive the foundations of the enclosing wall; it lay in the line of the foundations amidst the perished cement of the wall, and its associations and position forbid us to think either that it was buried before the wall was thought of or was inserted after the wall was ruined. Mr. Atkinson formed the theory—with natural hesitation—that it might be a foundation burial, and I understand that Sir Jas. Frazer accepts this suggestion. A full report of the whole work will shortly be issued in the Reading College Research Series.
(xxiv) Eastbourne, Beachy Head. The Rev. W. Budgen, of Eastbourne, tells me of a hoard of 540 coins found in 1914 in a coombe near Bullock Down, just behind Beachy Head. The coins range from Valerian (1 coin) to Quintillus (4 coins) and Probus (1 coin); 69 are attributed to Gallienus, 88 to Victorinus, 197 to the Tetrici, and 40 to Claudius Gothicus ; the hoard may have been buried about A.D. 280, but it has to be added that 130 coins have not been yet identified. Hoards of somewhat this date are exceedingly common; in 1901 I published accounts of two such hoards detected, shortly before that, at points quite close to the findspot of the present hoard (see Sussex Archaeological Collections, xliv, pp. 1-8).
Mr. Budgen has also sent me photographs of some early cinerary urns and a 'Gaulish' fibula, found together in Eastbourne in 1914. The things may belong to the middle of the first century A.D. The 'Gaulish' type of fibula has been discussed and figured by Sir Arthur Evans (Archaeologia, lv. 188-9, fig. 10; see also Dressel's note in Bonner Jahrbücher, lxiv. 82). Its home appears to be Gaul. In Britain it occurs rather infrequently; east of the Rhine it is still rarer; it shows only one vestige of itself at Haltern and is wholly absent from Hofheim and the Saalburg. Its date appears to be the first century A.D., and perhaps rather the earlier two-thirds than the end of that period.