How frigid and disappointing is not this record! But listen to the story which Sir Arthur Evans related to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in his Presidential address at Newcastle last September:
The work at Corbridge, the ancient Corstopitum, begun in 1906, and continued down to the autumn of 1914, has already uncovered throughout a great part of its area the largest urban centre--civil as well as military in character--on the line of the Wall, and the principal store-house of its stations. Here (together with well-built granaries, workshops, and barracks, and other records of river life as are supplied by sculptured stones and inscriptions, and the double discovery of hoards of gold coins) has come to light a spacious and massively constructed stone building, apparently a military store-house, worthy to rank besides the bridge-piers of the North Tyne among the most important monuments of Roman Britain. There is much here, indeed, to carry our thoughts far beyond our insular limits. On this, as on so many other sites along the Wall, the inscriptions and reliefs take us very far afield. We mark the gravestone of a man of Palmyra, an altar of the Tyrian Hercules--its Phoenician Baal--a dedication to a pantheistic goddess of Syrian religion and the raised effigy of the Persian Mithra. So, too, in the neighbourhood of Newcastle itself, as elsewhere on the Wall, there was found an altar of Jupiter Dolichenus, the old Anatolian God of the Double Axe, the male form of the divinity once worshipped in the prehistoric Labyrinth of Crete. Nowhere are we more struck than in this remote extremity of the Empire with the heterogeneous religious elements, often drawn from its far Eastern borders, that before the days of the final advent of Christianity Roman dominion had been instrumental in diffusing. The Orontes may be said to have flowed into the Tyne as well as the Tiber.
This quotation has been given at length in order to sustain the contention--put forth more than once in this book--that treasures associated with the Roman epoch lie around us in every part of our island, and that all sorts of novel surprises mutely await the advent and quest of the diligent investigator.