1. It is entirely remote from Ickleton Church, of which you can only see thence the top of the steeple in the distance. 2. Ickleton Church is, in its present site, of remote antiquity; its west door and nave being (as I believe) in the oldest style of Norman or semicircular architecture. 3. The Church Bottom is as closely contiguous to your Temple or columnar Building, as a public road can well be to a rural church, allowing to the latter any yard or purlieus at all. 4. I believe the coinage found is mostly of, or after, the reign of Constantine.
Therefore, I can hardly refrain from inferring as follows:—That your columnar Building was used (whether constructed or not) as a Christian Church. That it was still standing when the East-Anglian Saxons became possessed of these parts. And that, upon their conversion to Christianity, it resumed its office of a church for this parish, and was succeeded by the Norman building, now standing in another place. Because, if the ancient Temple Church of our Roman predecessors had been swept away finally, or finally desecrated in the fifth or sixth century, the vernacular name, Church Bottom, would be completely unaccountable.
You will perceive a corollary to all this. The dip or bottom is much too trivial to have been observable upon land; and it must have been named in reference to the road. From which you ascertain that there was a regular road or way precisely in the direction of the existing road, at the time when the Roman building was still in use as a church."
The villa, which has lately been laid bare by Mr. Neville at Chesterford, is the ancient site formerly mentioned by Stukeley under the name of "Templi Umbra," in the Borough Field, as shown in his plan of the Station, given in his "Itinerary,"[1] and the sketch engraved in the "Reliquiæ Galeanæ."
The account of this supposed Temple, and of the survey of Chesterford, in July, 1719, given by Stukeley in his "Itinerarium Curiosum," does not differ essentially from the observations contained in his letter addressed to Roger Gale, immediately after his visit. As this last, however, apparently less known to those who have written on the remains of this Station, has the additional value of having been the record of recent impressions, it may not be uninteresting to cite the passage. Speaking of Chesterford Magna, and the great Icknild-street there crossing the Cam, Stukeley says:—"I had the pleasure to walk round an old Roman city, there, upon the walls, which are still visible above ground; the London road goes fifty yards upon them, and the Crown Inn stands upon their foundations. Thither I summoned some of the country people, and, over a pot and pipe, fished out
- ↑ Itinerarium Curiosum, 1776. Stukeley surveyed the remains at Chesterford in 1719.
