Wroxeter lies within a short distance, but only approached along a narrow and uneven lane. Its fine church-tower looks down upon little more than a few farms and bartons; for village, as generally understood, there is none. This simple rural place, aromatic with hay and straw and corn, is the representative of, and takes its name from, the great Roman city of Uriconium, one-third larger than Pompeii, destroyed by the fury of savage hordes more than fourteen hundred years ago. The City of Uriconium,—the “City of the Wrekin”—was established shortly after A.D. 48, when the Roman general, Ostorius Scapula, had driven out the British tribes. He set an important station here, at a crossing of the Watling and the Ikenild Streets, and the place not only served as an armed camp to guard the roads and the ford of the Severn, but grew to be the most important market along the road to Wales. It lasted four hundred years, and only fell some forty years after the Romans had deserted Britain. Uriconium was then taken by the combined onslaughts of the Welsh tribes, and burnt to the ground, and the Romanised British who had remained were all massacred.

To this great city, its site now under corn and grass land, and inhabited by a handful of peasants, the Roman road led, on its way to Wales and the shores of the Menai, and to its site still leads, but beyond is lost, save to those who study archÆology. The only relics left on the spot to tell of that vanished place are the two Roman pillars standing before the church; the font, made out of a carved capital; and that massive fragment of masonry, the Old Wall, standing once in the centre of the city, but now solitary in a field.

Superstition brooded for ages upon this spot, and weird legends were created by the terrors the lonely place had for the ignorant of other times. Dead and gone Romans, who had, perhaps, been very matter-of-fact and commonplace persons in their lives, and gifted with all the small virtues of the hearth-loving citizen, loomed large, menacing, and supernatural before those whose business took them near the ruin, and so it was not until modern times that much was done to unearth what relics might lie deep down below the earth deposited by the changes of so long a period.

It was in 1859 that two acres of land were excavated. What did they find? Many things. Fragments of the red Samian ware on which the Roman citizens served their banquets, and whence they pledged one another, drinking to the eternity of Rome. A rusty key without a lock, and a stylus among bones, wine-cups, and scattered coins; the wooden tablets it wrote upon perished, like the hand that held it. The figure of a cock, modelled in lead, once a child’s toy, and near it the skeleton of a child, doubtless the one that owned that ancient plaything. Three skeletons of older persons were found, crouched up in one of the underground hypocausts. A hypocaust was a basement chamber, constructed to heat a room or house. Into one of these places those persons had fled when the barbarians stormed the city. They intended to creep out when danger was past, but the place was fired, and they perished in their hiding-place. Two of these fugitives were women; the other an old man. Within his grasp lay a pile of Roman coins, 142 in all, and, beside them, all that was left of his cash-box—some fragments of wood and rusty nails.

Roofing-slates, still with nails in many of their holes, were discovered in the ruins; the slate, by its appearance, judged to have been brought from Bettws-y-Coed. Millstones for grinding corn, and a charred heap of the corn itself, were found; brooches, seals, household gods, and fragments of the innumerable intimate articles of everyday life. Even some careless scribbling, such as that often found on the walls of Pompeii, was seen; but before it could be protected some graceless excursionists among the thousands carried by rail at that time to see the novelty of a buried city, obliterated it with their walking-sticks.

The two acres then explored, with the little that has been done since, give the impression that if the three-miles’ circuit of the walls could be excavated, results surpassing the finds at Silchester might be attained.

From Wroxeter, crossing the Severn, the Watling Street went by the two Strettons Wattlesborough, taking its name from being situated on the great road; Rutunium, now Rowton; thence to Mediolanum at the crossing of the river Tanad, under the Breidden, a site now called Clawdd Coch, or “Red Ditch”; Mons Heriri, under the shadow of Snowdon (whose Welsh name is Eryri, or Eagles’ Mountain) at the ancient earthwork known as Tomen-y-Mur, in the Vale of Maentwrog; and to the sea-coast at Segontium, identified with Caer Seiont, near Carnarvon. A branch, with stations of the way at Bovium (Bangor-ys-Coed); Deva, the great fortress of the Twentieth Legion, identical with Chester, on the Dee; Varae, the modern Bodfari; and Conovium, by the Conway (Caer HÊn, or Old Fort), traversed the Dee estuary and the coast-line looking out to Anglesey and the Irish Sea.