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Victoria County History of Kent Vol. 3  1932 - Romano-British Kent - Towns - Page 66

Of the rest of the Roman town walls we know nothing. Various pieces of old masonry,  12 ft. thick or more, were detected under the modern streets during the drainage, and many of them have been from time to time explained as bits of the Roman town wall. But the principal theory, which concerns Sun and Guildhall Streets, seems to rest on a total mistake as to what was found beneath them (p. 73), and the remains in general are both too 


Fig. 13.—Canterbury: Fragment of Roman Gateway adjoining the Quenin Gate
(From a drawing by Major Gordon Home
 in Arch. Journ. lxxxvi, 271)

incoherent to fit into any theory of the Roman ramparts and too ill-recorded to be assigned offhand to Roman builders. Nor do the arguments based, for example, by Faussett on old Canterbury boundaries yield any satisfactory results. We must in the meantime be content with the three reasonably fixed points of the Worth, Riding and Quenin Gates on the east, and the line of the river on the west. Roman Canterbury, as walled, cannot have been very different in size from that part of the wailed medieval town which lay to the east of the Stour—some forty or fifty acres in extent.
   From the walls we pass to the inhabited area within them. The area in which Roman houses have actually been found measures roughly some 550 yards from north to south and 400 yards from east to west. Its limits are, on the north St. Alphege Lane, on the east Iron Bar Lane and Simon Langton’s Schools, on the south St. John’s Lane, and on the west the channel of the Stour which now flows under King’s Bridge at the end of High Street (plan, Pl. XII). It has no very definite boundaries, but it seems to have been largely  

surrounded by water. On the west a branch of the Stour still flows  appropriately. On the other sides, deposits of silt and mud, some of them 130 ft. across, have been found, one near the north-western or Arundel tower of the Cathedral, one under Iron Bar Lane and the adjacent parts of Burgate and the Parade, and one under the eastern part of Watling Street. These indicate

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