From Newberry the Roman road (I believe coming from Silchester) Cunetio passes east and west to Marlborough, the Roman Cunetio¹ named from the river. This town consists chiefly of one broad and strait street, and for the most part upon the original ground-plot ; nor does it seem unlikely that the narrow piazza continued all along the sides of the houses is in imitation of them: the square about the church in the eaftern part one may imagine the site of a temple fronting this street: to the south are some reliques of a priory: the gate-house is left: on the north has been another religious house, whereof the chapel remains, now turned into a dwelling-house.

Where now is the seat of my lord Hartford was the site of the Roman castrum, for they find foundations and Roman coins ; I saw one of Titus in large brass: but towards the river, and without my lord's garden-walls, is one angle of it left very manifeftly, the rampart and ditch intire: the road going over the bridge cuts it off from the limits of the present cattle: the ditch is still twenty foot broad in some part: it paired originally on the fouth of the summer-house, and so along the garden-wall, where it makes the fence, to the turn of the corner: the mark of it is still apparent broader than the ditch, which has been repaired since, but of narrower dimension: then I suppose it went through the garden by the southern foot of the mount [Marlborough Mound [Map]], and round the house through the court-yard, where I have marked the track thereof with pricked lines in Plate 62. There is a spring in the ditch, so that the foss of the castrum was always full of water. I suppose it to have been five hundred Roman feet square within, and the Roman road through the present street of Marlborough went by the side of it. Afterward, in Saxon or Norman times, they built a larger castle, upon the same ground, after their model, and took in more compass for the mount; which obliged the road to go round it with a turn, till it falls in again on the well side of the mount at the bounds of Preshute parish. Roman coins have been found in shaping the mount ; which was the keep of the later castle, and now converted into a pretty spiral walk, on the top of which is an octagonal summer-house represented Tab. I. This neighbouring village, Preshute, has its name from the meadows the church stands in, which are very low: in the windows upon a piece of glass is written, DNS RICHARDUS HIC VICARIUS, who I believe lived formerly in a little house at Marlborough, over-against the castle, now an ale-house, where his name is cut in wood in the same old letters over the door.

Note 1. At Froxfield, south of Ramesbury, upon the via Trinobantica, a Roman villa discovered anno 1724. under a wood two Mosaic pavements. Lord Winchelsea has the drawings of them. Many antiquities found here.