Description of The Wall
The wall, an impressive example of standing Roman walling, is nearly 2000 years old. It measures 23 metres (75 ft) long, 8 metres (26 ft) high and 2.5 metres (8 ft) thick. It is the second largest piece of surviving civil Roman building in Britain (the largest being the "Old Work" at Wroxeter). The structure comprises alternate bands of Roman brick and coursed masonry. In the centre of the wall are two large arched openings about 3 metres (10 ft) wide and 4 metres (13 ft) high; there are further arched alcoves on the eastern side.
The wall lies to the west of St Nicholas' Church, which includes in its late Saxon and early medieval fabric much re-used Roman brick and masonry.
The remains of the town's public baths, lying immediately west of the wall, were excavated in four seasons from 1936 to 1939 by Dame Kathleen Kenyon and date from approximately 160 AD. The wall and some of the foundations of the baths are now laid out to public view. They are adjoined by a building housing the Jewry Wall Museum and Vaughan College, which stands on the remainder of the baths site (including the site of the three furnaces). The museum contains excellent local examples of Roman mosaics and wall plaster.
The site is in the guardianship of English Heritage.
Read more about this topic: Jewry Wall
Famous quotes containing the words description of the, description of, description and/or wall:
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)