of the dawn on summer mornings; and on
many a winter's night, when riding at its foot,
laughed at the dismal failure of its very best
efforts to look inhospitable. If there is a lump
of earth in the inanimate world that I can call
my friend, it is old Wrekin. Now antiquaries
may read through their spectacles of ancient
Uriconium. "What is that?" I said to myself,
"but old Wrekin over again." The Romans
had no W or K, they were obliged to write down
Wrekin Urecin; ium is only the addendum,
which says there's the name of a place. Vowels
are pronounced and altered in all sorts of ways:
so ancient Uriconium is old Wrekinium. Alas!
a nursling of my poor friend's lying dead and
buried at his feet.

When I heard about the disinterment, I
remembered the grave well. There was a sort of
colossal ruined headstone over it, called the
Old Wall, and that was all that marked the
resting-place of my friend's first and only child.
Wroxeter is but a puny little changeling. Merit
it has; it neither sits upon nor comes too near
the grave of the dead city.

The Romans had a sensible way of accepting
all the names of places that they found in
conquered countries, altering them as little as might
be for the necessary adaptation to their Latin
throats and tongues. Some of the legionaries in
Britain, who had new cities to name, seem to
have taken words that pleasantly reminded them
of their own country; but the common rule was
followed when a town at the base of an
important hill, which was a landmark throughout
the surrounding region, took the name of the
hill, and became Uricon-ium or Wrekin town.
More great hills than this one were called
Wrekin by the British. Urachean means
heaps of earth; and that was the first
form of the word Wrekin. The Romans
did not pronounce badly when they spelt it—
for they had two forms—Virocon or Uricon.
And it happens that, when they called their
place Uricon-ium, the British name and Roman
ending, meant the town under a heap of earth.
Prophecy was in the word. There is no doubt
now about the heap of earth over the town—
shovels are in it; and there is no doubt about
the Roman ending.

That heap of earth, on the old Roman town
concealing all its skeletons, except, as it may be,
a bony index finger represented by the stones of
the Old Wall, is resolute to speak. In spite of
all the efforts made to stop its mouth with
turnip-crops and corn—for it is arable land upon
the surface—it cries out, "Look into me. Pay
the men for their turnips, and away with them.
Dig me, I say, for the knowledge I contain."

Nobody who has left Shrewsbury by the road,
against which is built Lord Hill's column, forgets
the scenery at Atcham. It is four or five miles out
of town, impressive for no grandeur at all, but
for a tranquil beauty pleasant to look back upon
from any day in life. As you cross there the
neat little stone bridge over the Severn, the
river below winds among, and sometimes
overflows, the greenest meadows, here and there
stealing an island out of them. There are
water-birds; there is a country church on a
smooth bank of turf; and there is a great
old inn, once brisk with coaching business, but
low fast asleep. On the other side the road is
skirted by the pleasant curve of a park-paling;
the ground undalates beyond. The Wrekin looks
important, close before us to the right; and if
we glance behind us to the left, there is a
bright landscape bounded by sharp outlines of
hills, the most conspicuous of all being Caer
Caradoc, on which legend declares (and I
religiously believe) Caractacus stood for the last
time at bay among his Roman hunters. There
lie fought, with his wife and daughter watching
from the mountain-top. His Britons were
defeated, and the women of his household, captured
by the Roman legionaries, were then marched
hitherward. To this city of Uriconium they
must have been brought. Here, doubtless, they
slept, or sought in vain to sleep, upon the first
or second night after their seizure.

For here we are at Uriconium. Under the
quiet Atcham church lie a few dead roots of the
city wall. Great fragments of columns from
the temple of one of the gods or goddesses,
worshipped in Uriconium, lie at this moment in
the churchyard on each side of the path, by
which the villagers go up to worship Him who
gave life to us all. A very little way below the
bridge there is the ford by which, at Uriconium,
the Roman legions crossed the Severn. There
is a tongue of land there, and on a platform of
slightly eminent ground, naturally smooth, by
which the ford is commanded, there are grassy
tumours, longing to be opened. By what sort,
of works the ford was protected we have only
to open those tumours and see. From this
point we walk over the foundations of the
ancient town wall, running upland from the
river, and then rounding off to form an oval
ring. There is nearly everywhere a slight
elevation of the ground to mark it, and where that
is lost we may yet trace something of the hollow
of the trench outside. The walls form an irregular
oval parallel to the river, and their
circuit is of not less than three miles. In tracing
them, we pass over ploughed fields and pasture
fields; once we pass through the garden of a
cottage where the capital of the column of a
Roman temple serves for a pumpstone. Within
the circuit there is hardly a shed built. The
massive fragment of old wall, the one morsel of
ruin that crops out from underground, is the
chief, and almost the only building visible.

The undulation of the ground enables us to
stand upon some little eminence, from which we
see nearly the whole grave at a glance. At a
glance we may then also see that the entire
skeleton of a large Roman town must truly lie
there underneath the clods. The soil consists of
ruin, modified on the surface by the action of the
air, the plough, the harrow, and manure cart—
these for centuries upon centuries. Still the
soil is discoloured by its contents. We happen
to see it as ploughed ground, and the rich red of
the surrounding fields contrasts obviously with