tion, and the facing stones retained a freshness almost as if they had been recently built. The round towers, which were on the exterior of the wall, had been built up solid after the wall itself was raised. Several small entrances were traced, with one or two vaults or chambers in the wall, which had perhaps served as watch-rooms; but the grand entrance was in the middle of the eastern side, looking towards Folkestone and Dover. This had consisted apparently of an arch between two small semicircular towers. The latter were built, like the wall, with facingstones and courses of bricks, but a great part of the gateway buildings had been constructed of large squared stones, some of them of enormous magnitude. These had all been thrown down by the shock, and were found lying in the utmost confusion in a deep hollow behind the remains of the two gateway towers. On some of them we might distinctly trace the rut of carriage wheels which had been driven over them when they were in their original position in the roadway of the gate, and another had a hollow in which there still remained a large quantity of lead, which had no doubt held the iron pivot or hinge on which the gate turned.

The area within the walls presented great inequalities of surface, and in some parts, when the weather was dry,

it cracked in places in a manner which shewed that remains of buildings lay underneath. One of these spots near the bottom of the bank to the southwest of the entrance gateway was excavated, and the lower parts of the walls of a small house were brought to light. It had been a parallelogram, containing four rooms of rather small dimensions, with the usual semi-circular recess on the south side of the south-eastern room, which had also a small square receding apartment on the east side that may have served for culinary purposes. The floors were all gone, but the hypocausts remained in a dilapidated condition, and the fireplaces contained heaps of ashes, as they had been left when last extinguished. The walls remained at an uniform height of about five feet, which is so generally the case with Roman villas and houses, that we are led to the supposition that masonry was not usually carried any higher, but that the superstructure was of timber. In the interior face of the extreme western wall of this house are a row of T-shaped iron cramps, driven in up to the head, which appear to have been fastenings of some framework or tapestry that covered the wall. The preceding sketch, taken from the south, represents the interior of the two eastern rooms of this house as they appeared after being excavated.

The wall to the left is the one which runs north and south through the middle of the house; the transverse wall, which has been much broken, had three arches. Another larger building was partly uncovered at the northern part of the area, but it had suffered much more in the convulsion caused by the landslip.

As I had been invited to assist my friends in the interesting task of bringing to light these curious remains of the past, I was on one or two occasions entrusted with the direction; and the circumstance which struck me as most remarkable was the few traces of buildings found in digging in the area of what we must suppose to have been once for its size a tolerably populous town. It struck me that by digging a trench inwardly from the principal gateway we should come upon a paved road, and perhaps find it lined with houses; but nothing of the sort was met with. Inward from this gateway, turning towards the north, is a high bank, uneven at the top, which I supposed might be formed by the ruins of buildings; but to my still greater astonishment there was nothing but hard rock from a foot and a half to two feet or more beneath the surface. It is not likely that on the site chosen for a town a rock like this would be left in such a position overlooking the gateway. But a comparison of this and other circumstances enables us to understand the nature of the catastrophe.

When the mass of cliff was detached by means of gunpowder in clearing the way for the railway near Dover, it is described as sliding rapidly forward, and carrying with it undisturbed whatever might be standing on its surface. Such exactly must have been the motion given to the mass on which stood the Roman town of the Portus Lemanis. Springs underneath, which found no outlet, gradually softened and loosened the clay under it until, when at last they burst forth, they detached the whole mass, and it slid forwards to the level. There, if it had met with no obstacles, it would probably have rested, with the town standing. But the place over which it moved was uneven and rocky, and it was this unevenness which caused the destructive effects now visible. It was evidently arrested in its

progress by the large mass of rock just alluded to as now rising behind the gateway, and it is to the shock caused by meeting with this impediment that we must ascribe the peculiar manner in which the gateway was overthrown, as well as the extraordinary breaking up and scattering of the wall at the north-eastern corner. The movement seems to have taken place from northeast to south-west, and the buildings which had passed over this mass of rock were perhaps carried onwards and completely rolled over in the earth. Excavations at the bottom of the hill in this direction, towards the old farmhouse which stands there, brought to light an immense depth of black mould, mixed with all sorts of remains and rubbish. On a careful comparison of circumstances, I am inclined to believe that the house described above originally stood just within the gateway, perhaps by the side of the road or street. The ground on which it stands had moved more easily down, and the walls are comparatively little disturbed. Some of them lean slightly, and they are a little dislocated at the southwestern corner. In the middle of the area at the top of the hill were found the remains of an extensive building, already alluded to, of which a plan is given in the accompanying cut. It

b

d

was about a hundred and twenty feet long, and consisted originally of a middle apartment (a), with an octagonal end towards the north (b), and two much larger apartments on each side (c and d). What the purpose of this building, which must have commanded a full view of the sea, may have been it is difficult to decide, though it was perhaps intended for the reception of strangers arriving in the port. The half-octagonal end (b), which looked immediately on the northern wall of

the town, from which it was not far removed, had certainly windows, for I myself picked up numerous pieces of window-glass close under the wall, upon the original level of the ground. Below the foundations of this building the bank is rather steep, and there had been another stoppage, probably by rock underneath, the effects of which were shown in a very singular manner. The great eastern apartment, with the northern end of the middle room, had been arrested in their progress by the obstacle, and remain in their original position, very slightly deranged; but, the impediment not existing in the same degree further west, the whole of the western side of the house had been cut off from the rest and carried a little way forwards, so that the walls now stand in the position marked in our plan by the dark parts, instead of the original position, which is here completed by the dotted lines. Similar effects may be traced in other parts of the town. The western wall is partially thrown down, just as we might expect from such a mass of masonry if, after receiving a certain degree of impetus from the forward movement of the ground, it was suddenly stopped. A comparison of some circumstances connected with the condition of the site will enable us to offer a very fair conjecture as to the proximate period at which this landslip occurred. Towards the lower end of the eastern wall in the interior was found a penny of the Saxon king Edgar, who reigned from 959 to 975. It is tolerably evident, therefore, that the landslip was subsequent to that period. At the time of its occurrence, the town walls appear to have been perfect or nearly so, and the walls of the houses remained at their present height, with the superstructure, of whatever material it may have been, cleared away. If this had not been the case with the houses, we should have found some of the rubbish of the upper parts of the building lying about. I think it is equally evident that, when the upper parts of the town walls were broken up to supply materials for the ecclesiastical and castellated buildings at the top of the hill, it was some length of time after they had been overthrown as they now appear, and that they had already been covered to a certain

depth with earth. This appears from the circumstance that the facingcourses of the wall have been in general broken away to a level which would have been that of the ground in their present position, but which would be quite unaccountable if the walls had been at the time standing upright. Moreover, if the stones of the gateway buildings had not been already thrown down and covered with the earth, they would have offered too tempting a prize to escape the medieval builders.

believe the ecclesiastical house which stood at the top of the hill, and to which the present church belonged, was erected in the twelfth century, and we should perhaps not be far from the truth if we placed the landslip to which we must ascribe the overthrow of the Roman ruins to the earlier part of the eleventh century.

From the effects of this convulsion the excavations at Lymne did not produce all the results which were expected from it, but still the discovery was one of high interest, and while uncovered, the ruins-especially the gateway and the house-were well deserving a visit. I regret to be obliged to say that a large portion of the excavations have since been filled up, and that the farmer who holds part of the land insists that the house and the gateway shall also be buried again. I hope this will not be done till all the stones in the latter have been carefully examined. If they were kept open, and a slight building-even but a tent-erected on the spot where visitors might obtain refreshments, I believe that a considerable profit might be realised.

The spot is indeed almost as interesting from the beauty of the scenery, as from the interest of its ancient Roman remains. Behind, it is screened from the north by the lofty cliff, crowned with castle and church, and all around is a magnificent panorama skirted by a small copse to the left, with the sea extending in front, below the flat grounds which in the course of ages have been gained from it, and far off to the right the extensive marshes of Dimchurch and Romney. A little stream now runs through the middle of the ancient town-it may perhaps be the identical spring which contributed chiefly to the great catastrophe of which have been described the