acquainted with articles made of better metal.[13]
The Roman colonists were the first makers of iron in Britain on any
large scale. They availed themselves of the mineral riches of the
country wherever they went. Every year brings their extraordinary
industrial activity more clearly to light. They not only occupied the
best sites for trade, intersected the land with a complete system of
well-constructed roads, studded our hills and valleys with towns,
villages, and pleasure-houses, and availed themselves of our medicinal
springs for purposes of baths to an extent not even exceeded at this
day, but they explored our mines and quarries, and carried on the
smelting and manufacture of metals in nearly all parts of the island.
The heaps of mining refuse left by them in the valleys and along the
hill-sides of North Derbyshire are still spoken of by the country
people as "old man," or the "old man's work." Year by year, from
Dartmoor to the Moray Firth, the plough turns up fresh traces of their
indefatigable industry and enterprise, in pigs of lead, implements of
iron and bronze, vessels of pottery, coins, and sculpture; and it is a
remarkable circumstance that in several districts where the existence
of extensive iron beds had not been dreamt of until within the last
twenty years, as in Northamptonshire and North Yorkshire, the remains
of ancient workings recently discovered show that the Roman colonists
were fully acquainted with them.

But the principal iron mines worked by that people were those which
were most conveniently situated for purposes of exportation, more
especially in the southern counties and on the borders of Wales. The
extensive cinder heaps found in the--Forest of Dean--which formed the
readiest resource of the modern iron-smelter when improved processes
enabled him to reduce them--show that their principal iron manufactures
were carried on in that quarter.[14] It is indeed matter of history,
that about seventeen hundred years since (A.D. 120) the Romans had
forges in the West of England, both in the Forest of Dean and in South
Wales; and that they sent the metal from thence to Bristol, where it
was forged and made into weapons for the use of the troops. Along the
banks of the Wye, the ground is in many places a continuous bed of iron
cinders, in which numerous remains have been found, furnishing
unmistakeable proofs of the Roman furnaces. At the same time, the iron
ores of Sussex were extensively