My son
William visited the place before the excavations were completed;
and he informs me that most of the floors were at first covered
with much rubbish and fallen stones, having their interstices
completely filled up with mould, abounding, as the workmen said,
with worms, above which there was mould without any stones. The
whole mass was in most places from 3 to above 4 ft. in thickness.
In one very large room the overlying earth was only 2 ft. 6 in.
thick; and after this had been removed, so many castings were
thrown up between the tiles that the surface had to be almost daily
swept. Most of the floors were fairly level. The tops of the
broken-down walls were covered in some places by only 4 or 5 inches
of soil, so that they were occasionally struck by the plough, but
in other places they were covered by from 13 to 18 inches of soil.
It is not probable that these walls could have been undermined by
worms and subsided, as they rested on a foundation of very hard red
sand, into which worms could hardly burrow. The mortar, however,
between the stones of the walls of a hypocaust was found by my son
to have been penetrated by many worm-burrows. The remains of this
villa stand on land which slopes at an angle of about 3 degrees;
and the land appears to have been long cultivated.
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