Stukeley delin.
I. Harris sculp.
DerbyDerby. has five churches; the tower of one is very fine. The new-erected silk manufacture is a remarkable curiosity: the house is of a vast bulk, five or six stories high: the whole furniture is one machine turned by a single water-wheel, which communicates its power through the whole, and actuates no less than 97–746 several wheels or motions, and still employs three or four hundred hands to over-look and act in concert with it. Mr. Loom the owner brought the design of it from Italy.[43] The waters that run here, whether from the lead mines or coal, are apt to cause the bronchocele in the fair sex.
Burton.
Beyond Derby, along the Ricning way is Burton upon the Trent, where is a bridge of thirty-seven arches. Here was an old abbey: they are pulling down the ruins to build a new church.
Derventio.
TAB. LXXXVI.
A mile below Derby, upon the river Derwent, stood the old Roman city Derventio, now called Little Chester. I traced the track of the wall quite round, and in some places saw under ground the foundation of it in the pastures, and some vaults along the side of it: they dig it up daily to mend the ways with. Mr. Lord’s cellar is built on one side of the wall three yards thick: it is of a square form, standing between the Roman way called the Ricning street and the river. Within the walls are foundations of houses in all the pastures; and in the fields round the castle (as they call it) you may see the tracks of the streets laid with gravel: in a dry summer the grass over them is very bare. Divers wells are found, some still remaining, square, curbed with good stone. Brass, silver, and gold Roman coins have been found in great abundance; earthen pipes, aqueducts, and all kinds of antiquities. Towards the river they have dug up human bones, brass rings, and the like. There was a bridge over the river, for it was too deep and rapid for a ford: they can feel the foundations of it with a staff. In Mr. Hodgkin’s cellar a stag’s head with horns was dug up; probably a temple thereabouts: a square well in his garden three foot and a half one way, and four another.
Ricning-way.
A little further northward upon the Ricning street,[44] which seems to take its name from the Saxon rige, dorsum, is Horreston castle, whose ruins on a hoary rock are nearly obliterated; and out of it they cut great quantities of rubstones to whet scythes withal. We are now got into the very Peak of Derbyshire, the British Alps, where the odd prospects afford some entertainment to a traveller, and relieve the fatigue of so tedious a road. Now you pass over barren moors, in perpetual danger of slipping into coal-pits and lead-mines; or ride for miles together, on the edge of a steep hill, on solid slippery rock or loose stones, with a valley underneath, where you can scarce discover the bottom with your eye; which brought into my mind that beautiful in Virgil,