A. Marlborough Mount. B. the Road to Kennet. C. the Castle. D. St. Peters Church. E. St. Marys. F. the Road to Ramsbury. G. the Kennet. H. the remains of the Roman Castrum. I. Lady Winchilseas. K. Preshute.
Stukeley, del.
11·2d.
Cunetio
29 Iun. 1723
Stukeley delin.
Parker Sculpt.
A little west of NewberryAd Spinam. is a village called Speen; which has given antiquarians a reasonable hint of looking for the town, in Antoninus called TAB. LX.ad Spinas, hereabouts; and doubtless it was where now stands the north part of the town of Newberry, still called Spinham.TAB. X. 2d Vol. At this place the great Icening-street road, coming from the Thames at Goring, and another Roman road running hence through Speen to Hungerford, and so to Marlborough, crosses the Kennet river. Newberry has derived itself and name from the ruins of the old one; and the grounds thereabouts are called Spinham lands. Dunington castle was once in the possession of Geffrey Chaucer. A remarkable large oak, venerable through many ages, because it bore his name, was felled in the civil wars. The Kennet, still called by the country people Cunnet, near Hungerford, parts the soil, that on the north side being a red clay gravel, that on the south a chalk. I have often wished that a map of soils was accurately made, promising to myself that such a curiosity would furnish us with some new notions of geography, and of the theory of the earth, which has only hitherto been made from hypotheses. This brings into my mind a remarkable passage in Sir Robert Atkins’s Glocestershire: “Lay a line (says he) from the mouth of the Severn to Newcastle, and so quite round the terrestrial globe, and coal is to be found every where near that line, and scarce any where else.�[46]
Cunetio.