A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE of broad flat stones let into one another and paved at the bottom with bricks set edgewise. A bank in the vicarage garden, some yards out- side the eastern rampart, was examined in 1873-4 and yielded a few flints, ashes, animals' bones and horns, and many potsherds, both Samian (one piece SAMOGENI, broken at the end) and ruder wares, and a piece with a rich brown glaze. Below the bank was a square ' well ' at least 1 2 feet deep, built of rough, squarish slabs placed edgeways one over the other. The whole seems to represent a rubbish heap and perhaps a disused well, adapted, as often, to the receipt of rubbish. 1 In addition to these traces of building, stray potsherds and coins and other small objects have been found freely round the ' station,' to such an extent as to show that the inhabitation in Roman times extended for some distance outside the ramparts, though the houses may have been nothing more substantial than huts of wood or mud. Remains have been found even on the west bank of the river, where Darley Grove once stood. Hardly more is known of the burial places. Stukeley mentions graves between the ' station ' and the river. A small jar of reddish-brown clay, decorated with little pellets of slip and rilled with burnt bones and bits of bronze ornaments, was found outside the east rampart. 2 A skeleton, imagined to have been originally in- terred in armour, was unearthed on Little Chester Green, south of the ' station,' in September 1824, but no reason whatever exists for calling this Roman. 3 When Darley Grove, west of the Derwent, was broken up in 1820, skeletons, Roman coins, and other remains were noted.* There are also records of burials within the ramparts, 6 but these may safely be put aside as not Roman. The smaller remains found in and near the ' station ' are abundant and ordinary. Among the pottery is much Samian, including embossed bowls probably dating from the second or early third century. 6 The piece with a rich brown glaze, accepted as Romano-British by Sir A. W. Franks, may form one of the rare specimens of Roman glazed ware. 7 1 Free. See. Antiq. vi. 120 ; Derb. Arch. Journ. vii. 77. Watkin explained the things as belonging to a botontlnus and an area fnalls. But the theory of ancient surveying to which these land-marks belong is more than doubtful ; and Franks' explanation as a rubbish heap seems certainly the safer. 2 Jewitt, Intellectual Observer, xii. 349, with figure. 3 Derby Mercury, 22 September, 1824, Glover, History, 1829, i. 295, with figure, and other writers. 4 Glover, History, . 293, note. 6 See, for example, Pilkington, View of the present State of Derbyshire (1789), ii. 198. 6 Derb. Arch. Journ. x. 159, plate vi.; xi. 82 ; Reliquary, i. plate 25. 7 Proc. Soc. Antiq. vi. 120. 218 FIG. 25. PAINTED COMMON WARE FOUND AT LITTLE CHESTER. (Derbyshire Archceohgjcal Journal^
