caused them to be laid bare by the plough, and indicated to the farmer, Mr. Orpwood, a cheaper store of draining stones than he could dig from the contiguous quarries. In conformity with the desire of Mr. Grove, the proprietor, nothing more will be removed that is worthy of preservation.
Among the fragments of pottery and tiles. Dr. Buckland recognised several pieces of black cellular lava, containing in some of its cells small crystals of the blue mineral Hauine: these must have come from the mill-stone quarries in the lava of Nieder-Mynich, five miles west of the Rhine, near Andernach, from which large mill-stones are now sent to England and all parts of the world, and from whence also the Romans might have brought their mill-stones (probably hand-mills), to the villa at Wheatley. The fragments yet found are less than 6 in. in diameter, and one of them has a flat worn surface on one side. Among the loose stones Dr. Buckland has also found, and deposited, with the fragments of mill-stone, in the Oxford Museum, a fragment of a grind-stone, which the curve on its margin shews to have been about 3 in. thick and nearly 3 ft. in diameter, and which is made not like our modern grind-stones, of sand-stone grit from the coal formation at Newcastle, but of red grit from the new red sand-stone. Whether the Romans got this stone from the red rocks on the Rhine near Heidelberg, or from the red sand-stone of Staffordshire, is uncertain. This curious fragment of a broken grind-stone appears to have been applied to a further secondary service as a whet-stone, by which both its sides have been so deeply worn that two-thirds of its thickness in its primary state of grind-stone, have been rubbed away. This economical use of the fragments of a broken grind-stone, shews that stones fit for whet-stones and grind-stones, as well as mill-stones, were costly articles, which then, as now, were only to be obtained in regions far distant from Oxfordshire[1].
This villa, which may be called the Wheatley villa, is situated on the south-eastern slope of an eminence about three furlongs from the river Thame, and about ten from the Roman road between Aelia Castra (Bicester), and Dorocina (Dorchester); and seems to have been an edifice of considerable extent.
- ↑ Similar grind-stones and whet-stones have not been duly noticed among the remains of other Roman villas, but they will probably be recognised in many of them as soon as antiquaries shall justly appreciate the value of Mineralogy and Geology.
